The Referring domains report in Site Explorer can help you identify websites explicitly built for selling links. The main attribute of such websites is the large number of sites they link to (related to the size of a website).
Besides, these websites usually get little to no traffic from Google, although they may have a pretty high Domain Rating score.
This is why we added “Dofollow linked domains” and “Traffic” columns straight into the Referring domains report.
Referring domains report results
For example, here at Ahrefs’ blog, we’ve never been greedy for external links. If a page or resource deserves a reference, we will link to it.
Our blog has approximately 2K pages indexed in Google.
Affiliate marketing whatsapp number list has a simple premise. Just like Batman and Robin, vendors team up with affiliate marketers for mutual gain, making it a win-win for many business owners.
Google SERP of Ahrefs' blog. Shows 1,990 pages indexed in Google
And Ahrefs’ Linked Domains report will show you that we link to around 1.5K websites.
Link Domains report results
So the ratio is close to 1:1. I’m not saying it’s a standard for every industry, but I hope you get the idea. A website with 500 pages linking to 5K different websites should raise flags.
You should note that a low DR and poor organic traffic do not always indicate a website’s low quality. It could be that the website is new and could grow into a strong one over time.
But when a linking website has low DR, ugly design and UI, low-quality content, and no organic traffic, there’s no way a link from it will be considered natural.
Google seems to have a well-maintained list of websites that sell links. And it may be using link-selling emails to expand that list. Check out this article from Barry Schwartz for more information.
To get a good sense of how serious the link problem is for your site, you can access Marie Haynes’ Disavow Blacklist Bulk Upload tool. Then export the list of your referring domains from Ahrefs and see how many of them are on Marie’s blacklist.
You should also estimate the linking pages visually.
Websites created for the sake of linking out are easily noticeable most of the time. Content on their pages won’t make much sense, and images will be a total mess.