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Analysis of
1 Million Backlinks
A Series of Case Studies
1,000,000
1.800.701.0793 www.singlegrain.com sales@singlegrain.com 1
www.SingleGrain.com
Table of Contents
Analysis of 1 Million Backlinks
Udemy (Part 1 of 10) . . . . . . Page 8
Airbnb (Part 2 of 10) . . . . . . Page 28
Lyft (Part 3 of 10) . . . . . . Page 44
Workday (Part 4 of 10) . . . . . . Page 62
HelloFresh (Part 5 of 10) . . . . . . Page 76

We analyzed 1 million backlinks via 10 random sample sets of 100,000 backlinks across 10
different websites from a variety of business verticals to determine how the link metrics from
those backlinks would impact gains or losses in organic search visibility.

A Quick Word About Link Analysis at Scale
If there was just one piece of advice I could give regarding link analysis, it would be this: don’t ever
manually review hundreds of thousands of backlinks one by one!
Seriously, don’t do it! You will burn out or fail (likely both) and your client/manager will be very upset with
you for not making proper use of your time.
What you should do is look for patterns, trends and commonalities among link metrics for a given set of
URLs to identify unnatural links.
Pro Tip: Powerful crawlers and anchor text classifiers like URL profiler can literally save you hundreds
of hours of grunt work. We’re in no way, shape or form affiliated with them, but we highly recommend
checking them out!

Here’s a link audit tool stack that I’d recommend:
• Ahrefs
• Majestic SEO
• Cognitive SEO
• Moz Open Site Explorer
• URL Profiler
• Google Search Console
Upon completing a link audit, you should have a few outputs to work with:
• Danger List – These are the links that are extremely likely to be unnatural and should be considered
for disavowal.
• Caution List – These are the links that could be unnatural and must be manually audited to determine
if they are safe or dangerous.
• Safe List – These are trustworthy, authoritative links that are most likely to be natural. Getting more of
these will help boost organic visibility.
• Link Schemes – These are large groups of similar links that are coming from the same source and are
the most probable cause of site-wide links.
• Link Opportunities – Some websites (especially popular brands) earn natural, high-quality links
without knowing it. An audit will help you discover those sources so you can build relationships and
earn more links.
• Link Equity Consolidation – In almost every case, there are authoritative inbound links pointing to 404
pages on any given website. Those 404 pages should be revived by implementing 301 redirects to a
live final destination URL to reclaim the lost link equity.
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Get our free SEO guide to learn how you can skyrocket your rankings,
even in a competitive niche! Click here to download it for free.

Link Metrics Considered
The link metrics can be segmented into 4 key categories:
• Diversity
• Trust
• Authority
• Relevance
These are the primary link metrics that will be used to evaluate each brand’s backlink profile:
Majestic Citation Flow – Rates how influential a URL may be based on how many sites are linking to it,
and based on a 100-point scale.
Majestic Trust Flow – Predicts how trustworthy a page is based on the trustworthiness of those sites that
are linking to it, based on a 100-point scale.
Moz Spam Score – Rates the level of penalization risk associated with a given URL, based on a scale of 0
– 17 where any rating of 11 or higher is likely to be spam.
Moz Domain Authority – An overall website rating that is calculated by metrics, such as linking domains,
number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, into a single 100-point logarithmic score.
Ahrefs Referring IP C-Class Diversity – IP Addresses are divided into lettered blocks (AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD).
The more referring C-Class Duplicates that exist within the link profile indicates that the site is likely to be
engaging in link networking.
Ahrefs URL Rating – Prediction score for how well a page is likely to rank in organic search results, based
on a 0-100 scale.
Learn More: What Is Link Roundup Link Building: The Practical Guide

Domains Evaluated
We included the following 10 websites in our study:

Analysis of 1 Million Backlinks:
Udemy (Part 1/10)
By Gaetano DiNardi
Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 42,000 courses and 14 million students.
With Udemy, you can learn programming, marketing, data science and more – all at your own pace and
schedule.
Analysis of
1 Million Backlinks
1,000,000
www.SingleGrain.com

Key Insights: Udemy’s Link Profile
• Referring Domain Velocity: Udemy has built links from more referring domains over time than key
competitors. On average, they earn links from approximately 2,000 referring domains per month. That
level of referring domain growth has been instrumental to their organic search visibility.
Source: Majestic
• Sitewide Linking: The most unnatural link type detected on Udemy’s link profile was sitewide links. A
sizeable portion of those links were widget links. A referring domain to backlink ratio of approximately
94:1 is a cause for concern.
Source: Ahrefs

Ahrefs reveals that EFLClassroom is linking to Udemy over 400k times:
Google calls out that the site is likely hacked and the meta description clearly states that it’s a directory link
website. This is a strong indicator of low-quality links:
Clear sign of an untrustworthy website that lacks brand credibility. Not the type of website you want
400,000 backlinks from.

After data sterilization, approximately 48,000 live links were found:
The distribution is showing that most referring domains have an authority of 30 or less, however there are
a few outliers at DA 30 and DA 90:

Outlier at DA 30
Newmarksdoor.com. This is your typical DA 30 blog. Upon reviewing

the site, it looks pretty safe. But let’s see where all those links are coming from.
Well I’ll be darned. It’s a sidebar widget link embedded into the template of every page on the site. This is
the type of link that could potentially get you into trouble, especially given that Google recently issued a
warning on sitewide widget links.
This could be perceived as unnatural linking at some point, so I’d recommend that Udemy ask them to
implement a rel=nofollow attribute to remain on the safe side.

Normally this may not be worth Udemy’s time, but because there are so many incoming
widget links, it would behoove them to nip this potential problem in the bud. The
referring URL level distribution tells us that most links are of low authority; however, there
appears to be an outlier at URL Rating 7:
This site that is loaded with strange links was the source of the URL Rating 7 outlier:

The normalized distribution proves that most referring domains have a Trust Flow rating
of zero. The drop-off after zero is pretty significant, which means that the majority of
referring domains are not trustworthy:
The URL Citation Flow is showing a drop-off that is slightly less intense than the Domain Trust Flow. We
can still conclude that the vast majority of these referring links are not influential, and very few of them are
positively impacting Udemy:

Example of a link from an untrustworthy source:
Moz’s Spam Score (0-17 scale) recommends reviewing links with a score above 10:

Here’s a good example of classic link spam – just a list of links from a foreign TLD:
Upon reviewing Moz’s Spam report, I noticed a huge number of .org links with a score of 11. Those links
are collegiate rip-off sites, posing as affiliates and trying to steal leads:

The site’s footer tells us everything we need to know:
The Duplicate IP C-Class is a staggering 96%, which is a cause for further investigation:

An example of low-quality links from different referring domains all hosted on the
same IP C-Class. This is commonly known as a “link network”:
These are the most commonly used phrases that external sites use when linking to Udemy:

Most of Udemy’s backlinks are coming from content and blog posts:
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Conclusion: Udemy
Udemy has acquired authority, relevance and trust over time – largely by building a product that is useful,
practical and makes people’s lives easier:
The #1 issue affecting Udemy’s link profile is referring root domain diversity. Our sample shows 3.9k
domains to 100,000 links:
Our sample was able to identify a small batch of safe links and danger links, but approximately ¾ of the
link samples could not be determined programmatically. It is recommended that these links be reviewed
manually to determine their fate:

Udemy: Recommendations
Due to the nature of Udemy’s business model, their content earns lots of links naturally. Udemy’s content
library consists of a broad set of topics, which allows them to earn links from many different relevant
sources like:
• Lifehacker
• Mashable
• HubSpot
• Huffington Post
• Business Insider
• Tech Crunch
• The Next Web
Example of a high-quality link from Mashable:
Collaborations have also been a golden source of link wealth for Udemy:

We can see that specific pages that are dedicated to specific courses can become
popular among niche audiences and earn lots of targeted backlinks:

Partner with Emerging Influencers
Continuing to partner with emerging influencers in niche topics will bring their audience to Udemy.
Learn More: Influencer Marketing 101: How to Succeed
This is an example of a link from Guitarworld.com that was built to Udemy by a popular guitar teacher.
Gaining the trust of these niche audiences are key to winning the SEO battle (as well as customer
growth, retention, and revenue battle!):

Disavow Rip-Off Collegiate .ORG Domains
These are the most unnatural links to Udemy because they are duplicate sites from the same IP C-Class
that are intended to manipulate page-rank as well as web visitors.
There is no difference between the .com and .org domain:

Content Opportunity: Udemy Success Center
There’s nothing people love more than an a good old-fashioned success story, so why not give it to
them? I bet that if Udemy interviewed prospective customers, one of the friction points would be the
uncertainty of “What happens next?”
A new landing page focusing on customer success stories would be a great way to generate some P.R.
buzz while building positive sentiment around the brand.
Testimonial style videos could be a cool option to explore as well.
Upon searching for customer success stories, I only found one poorly executed blog post from 2013:
Learn More: The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content

Build Diverse, Non-Branded Anchor Text Links
While Udemy’s anchor text mostly follows a natural pattern with 61% branded anchors, 34%
miscellaneous anchor text is quite high. Ideally, there would be less disparity among miscellaneous
versus commercial anchors, with commercial being closer to 30% rather than where it currently sits at 5%.
Reclaim Link Equity & Fix Broken Backlink Targets

Approximately 34k links are pointing to 8k broken targets on Udemy.com:
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Final Thoughts
Udemy is a great brand and has done a great job standing out in a very competitive marketplace.
They’re at a low risk for link penalization, which is great! But that doesn’t mean they should ignore some of
the warning signs identified in this mini audit.
Implementing the recommended actions will help them improve their organic search visibility and get
even further ahead of the competition.
Any SEO-savvy marketer with technical chops can likely implement these recommendations. If you’re a
marketer looking to improve your link game, check out our ultimate guide to link building.
If you’re not an SEO-savvy marketer or you just don’t have the time, Single Grain can help you! We’ve
helped business of all sizes improve their marketing ROI, ultimately increasing revenue – check out
some of our case studies here.

Airbnb (Part 2/10)
By Gaetano DiNardi
Airbnb is an online marketplace and homestay network enabling people to list or rent short-term lodg-
ing in residential properties. In plain English, it’s a site that allows travelers to gain access to unique homes,
experiences, and places around the world.
Analysis of
1 Million Backlinks
1,000,000
www.SingleGrain.com

Long-Tail Traffic? Who the Hell Cares?
Before I even started to examine their backlinks, I noticed a big, fat, ugly 404 for “best airbnb
destinations” — a query that is slightly longer tail, but higher intent.
Airbnb should fix this 404 immediately!

Key Insights: Airbnb’s Link Profile
• Link Networking from Their Own International TLDs: A sizeable portion of Airbnb’s links are simply
links from themselves. They probably won’t get penalized by doing this, because Google is smart
enough to recognize that the intent is not manipulation, it’s just simply the nature of their cross domain
linking structure.
A referring domain to backlink ratio of approx. 472:1 should raise a few eyebrows:
Source: Ahrefs
• Link Bloat: For a site of Airbnb’s magnitude, they should have higher-quality links. While too many
low-value links likely won’t hurt them, it isn’t going to help them either. Ahrefs reveals that the top six
referring domains are international TLDs:

After data sterilization, approx. 15k live links were found:
Airbnb has approximately 85k dead links coming from their own international TLDs:

I lowered the crawl speed by decreasing the threads and crawled the links again
in Screaming Frog to confirm the accuracy of the HTTP responses:
I spot-checked a few of the links to confirm the server side errors:

• Referring Domain Velocity: On average, Airbnb earns links from approximately
2,000 referring domains per month. That level of referring domain growth has been
instrumental to their organic search visibility. Airbnb has built links from more
referring domains over time than key competitors:
Source: Majestic
The distribution is showing a wide range of referring domains at various strengths, with a surge of
referring domains between DA 70-96, which is unusual for most sites:

Outliers at DA 88
From my experience, it’s rare to see more referring domains at the higher end of the distribution, but
Airbnb is one of those sites that can naturally attract links from authoritative domains. Here are a few
examples.
CBS Local
CBS mentioned Airbnb as a lodging option for travelers looking to attend the olympic games. This is the
benefit of having a unique product with strong branding: natural link acquisition.

Vice
Another example of naturally occurring link acquisition:
The URL rating distribution from Ahrefs skews heavy toward the low end, with a cluster at the 8-11 range.
We can infer that most of these individual URLs from the Ahrefs index are of lower quality:

Example of a spammy backlink identified by Ahrefs:
The Domain Citation Flow displays a strong cluster at around 30, with a longer tail drop off that normalizes
at 60. We can conclude that most referring domains are somewhat influential, and there may be a few
that are very influential:

Example of a link from an influential domain with high Citation Flow:
At the URL level, most backlinks have a Trust Flow rating of zero, with a significant drop off after 30, though
there are a few outliers in the 50 range:
Moz’s Spam Score (0-17 scale) recommends reviewing links with a score above 8. Most of Airbnb’s links
are below the alert threshold:

Upon reviewing Moz’s Spam Report, there were a number of URLs rated 9. Those
links are from very unnatural domains, with the same spammy template, just
different domain names:
The Duplicate IP C-Class is a staggering 99%, largely because of site-wide links pointing to Airbnb.com
from its own international TLDs:

Most of Airbnb’s backlinks are coming from content and blog posts:
Related Content: How to Build Premium Quality Backlinks to Boost Ranking [podcast]

Conclusion: Airbnb
Despite a huge number of links from their own networks, Airbnb is very unlikely to face any risk of
penalization from search engines.
Our sample was able to identify a small batch of safe links and danger links, but more than half of the links
could not be determined programmatically. It is recommended that these links be reviewed manually to
determine their fate.
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Airbnb: Next Steps
• Investigate server response errors on international TLDs
• Determine if Googlebot is throttling sub-domains
• Fix 404 error: “Best Airbnb Destinations”
• Disavow danger list URLs
• Review caution list
• Invest in content strategy:
• Data-Driven Content
• Infographics
• Videos
• Contests
• User-Generated Content

Content Opportunity:
Unconventional Ways to Utilize Airbnb
From the Vice backlink example, it’s evident that folks are looking for outside-the-box ways to get value
from Airbnb besides room rentals. They could survey their customers or hold a contest for the most
unique use of an Airbnb rental.
Jumpshot, a marketing analytics company, has already taken a similar premise and built an infographic
called “Who Uses Airbnb and Why?”
P.S. – They didn’t link to Airbnb in the post, which would be an easy link opportunity if Airbnb wanted it.
Related Content: Hurdlr’s Simple But Genius Approach That Got Them 3,000 New Users From One Blog Post [podcast]

Final Thoughts
While Airbnb is at low risk for link penalization, there’s still a lot of opportunity to improve their Content
Strategy.
Airbnb is just now getting ahead of their competition, and should implement the recommended actions
to remain ahead!
Any SEO-savvy marketer with technical chops can likely implement these recommendations. If you’re a
marketer looking to improve your link game, check out our ultimate guide to link building.

Lyft (Part 3/10)
By Gaetano DiNardi
Lyft is an on-demand ridesharing/taxi service, available in most major cities across the U.S. with possible
global expansion soon. Lyft describes themselves as “your friend with a car, whenever you need one.”
Download their mobile app and get a ride from a friendly driver within minutes.
Analysis of
1 Million Backlinks
1,000,000
www.SingleGrain.com

Non-Branded Opportunities
Before I even got into their backlinks, I was curious to see if Lyft was taking advantage of any
non-branded organic traffic.
The ridesharing service industry is one that heavily relies on branding and trust. Think about it: you’re
putting your life in a complete stranger’s hands!
Because the industry is so brand-centric, most of the keyword opportunities are branded.
Lyft’s top 5 organic keywords from SEMrush are branded opportunities.
That said, Lyft has also optimized their homepage for natural language, customer-centric searches like “I
need a ride.”
I’d bet there’s a lot of voice searches for a term like this, too.

They’re also ranking #1 for “free rides” with their coupon landing
page. Again, a smart strategy from Lyft.

Trump Effect: Impact of Public Relations on SEO
It always grinds my gears when people think of SEO as a “silo” channel. As search engine algorithms
focused more on user engagement metrics and less on how many keywords are stuffed into a landing
page template, the impact of brand authority, content, social, P.R. and e-mail has become more important
than ever before.
From Fortune:
From Mashable:
This could potentially be seen as a “risky” strategy by some P.R. enthusiasts, but it actually turned out to be
brand buzz gold for Lyft. They took a firm stand on a controversial trending topic, and it yielded tons of
great links from authoritative sites like Mashable and Fortune.

Ahrefs validates a surge of referring domain growth in the past 30 days:
And let’s not forget about business results either. Lyft app downloads skyrocketed:
Source: TechCrunch

Key Insights: Lyft’s Link Profile
• Sitewide Links from Low-Quality Domains: The top referring domain to Lyft.com is a strange site
with no authority or relevance. There are 126,624 dofollow backlinks from a strange site
(thumbtackpress.com):
Source: Ahrefs
Every page on this site is duplicate content (which is an indicator of a spam site):

• Link Popularity (David & Goliath): Lyft has done a nice job of building brand authority,
and as a result has acquired more links than lower level competitors, such as Via.
However, Uber is still the behemoth of the ridesharing service industry, and has simply
acquired more links from more referring root domains. Lyft is trailing Uber by
approximately 15K referring domains in the battle of link supremacy:
Source: Open Site Explorer
After data sterilization, approximately 33K live links were found:
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Why So Many Dead Links?
To be clear, a “dead link” in this context means a link that was once live and indexed but is no longer
there.
Here are two possible scenarios:
• The referring page still exists, but the link was removed.
• The referring page no longer exists (404).
In the case of a popular site like Lyft, it’s very possible that a large number of site-wide links were
dropped from the time the link data was collected versus the time it took me to crawl the links and
complete the analysis.
Let’s see where some of these dead links are coming from.
There were over 10,000 dead links coming from lyfthub.com:
Lyfthub.com appears to be “shut down” by the GoDaddy default landing page:

Archive.org proves that this was once a spammy fake forum site:
The distribution is showing a wide range of referring domains at various strengths, with the biggest cluster
between DA 30-60, and a few outliers at 87+:

Cluster at DA 40
I think most SEOs would agree that it’s quite natural to a see a site such as Lyft.com with an abundance of
referring domains at DA 40. Very common link from a typical mid-tier personal finance blog.
SuburbanFinance.com

Outliers at DA 90
Lyft can naturally attract links from authoritative domains based on newsworthy, headline-style P.R. efforts.
CNBC.com
CNBC published a story on Lyft’s efforts to compete with Uber.
Vox.com
This was actually a cool piece of user-generated content.

The URL rating distribution from Ahrefs skews heavily toward the low end, with a cluster
at the 7-9 range and a second surge of links at 30-38. Given the spike at 0, we can conclude
that most backlinks from the Ahrefs index are of lower quality.
This is a low-quality forum link identified by Ahrefs. Normally forums are red flags for spam, but in this case
it’s a legit forum site for Lyft drivers to network with each other:

The Domain Trust Flow distribution has outliers at 0 and 23, an indication that there are
many referring domains that are untrustworthy, and likely site-wide in some cases:
The outlier at Trust Flow 23 is a site-wide link coming from banner ads:

A Quick Word on Banner Ad Image Links
Typically, for any kind of paid link, Google recommends a nofollow on those to draw a line in the sand.
That said, search engines have gotten really good at understanding how to best interpret these. Google is
smart enough to know that these links aren’t contextual and won’t place as much value on them.
Source: YouTube
At the URL level, most backlinks have a Citation Flow rating of 14-20, with a significant drop off after 27, an
indication that most backlinks are somewhat influential:

Moz’s Spam Score (0-17 scale) recommends reviewing links with a score
above 8. Most of Lyft’s links are below the alert threshold:
Heavily branded anchor text aligns with the top organic keywords. Nothing about their anchor text profile
seems unnatural.

The anchor word cloud confirms a natural anchor text profile:
Source: Majestic
Despite a huge number of site-wide links from low-quality domains, Lyft has a natural link profile and is
likely safe from penalization:
Lyft has shown a very natural link profile, despite 34% of links falling into the caution bucket. These links
should be reviewed manually to determine their fate:

Lyft Conclusions & Next Steps:
• P.R. has a massive influence on backlinks!
• Continue finding ways to be relevant in the news.
• Continue to differentiate from Uber; most of the time when a given site
links to Lyft, it links to Uber as well.
• Disavow Thumbtackpress.com
• Invest in content that will earn diverse anchor text links.
• Focus on keyword research to find non-branded opportunities.
• Disavow Danger List URLs.
• Review Caution List.
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Final Thoughts
While Lyft is at low risk for link penalization, there’s still a lot of opportunity to improve their Content
Strategy by focusing on non-branded opportunities.
Lyft is ahead of the small fish, but Uber still remains the leader here. In most cases where Lyft earned a
link, Uber earned one, too. Standing out and differentiating is key.
For example, this program to “keep seniors moving” was one of the top linked pages on their blog.
Campaigns such as this will be the right approach going forward.
An SEO-savvy in-house marketer with technical chops can likely work with Lyft’s P.R and development
teams to implement these recommendations. If you’re a marketer looking to improve your link game,
check out our ultimate guide to link building.

Workday (Part 4/10)
By Gaetano DiNardi
Workday is an enterprise-level software solution for human resource and financial management. Their
platform is a unified alternative to enterprise resource planning, boasting clients such as Netflix, LinkedIn,
Adobe, and Visa.
Analysis of
1 Million Backlinks
1,000,000
www.SingleGrain.com

Key Insights: Workday’s Link Profile
• Referring Domain Velocity: Workday and Kronos have been fighting it out for the top spot since 2014.
Workday has since taken a slight edge, building more links from more referring domains over time
than key competitors. On average, they earn links from approximately 2,000 referring domains per
month. That level of referring domain growth has been instrumental to their organic search success.
Source: Majestic SEO

• Total Referring Domains: Aside from gaining links faster than competitors, Workday
has also acquired more overall links from more linking root domains, giving them a
handsome edge against the competition.
After data sterilization, approximately 37k live links were found:

The distribution is showing a wide range of referring domains at various strengths,
with the biggest cluster between DA 30-60, and a few outliers at 73 and 80:

Cluster at DA 42
Upon inspecting the cluster at DA 40-43, there was nothing unnatural about any of the referring domains.
I’d expect to see some duplicate and site-wide links, but even those appeared sparingly. The example
below is a typical mid-tier editorial link; they mention how Bonus.ly integrates with Workday to reward
their employees.
RecruitingTools.com
Very common link from a typical mid-tier human resources blog.

Outliers at DA 80
Products that disrupt traditional ways of business operation, such as Workday, will naturally attract
links from authoritative domains based on the unique story behind their product. See two examples
of this below, the first from BusinessNewsDaily.com and the second from MarketWired.com.
The page authority skews heavily toward the mid-low end, with a cluster at the 13-20 range, and a second
surge of links at 28-31. Based on these ranges, we may conclude that most backlinks are of average
quality, with outliers above and below the average:

This is a low-quality link. There’s no content on the page except lists of other links:
The Domain Trust Flow distribution has strong outliers at 24-25 and 29, which is an indication of duplicative
site-wide links, some of which may be unnatural:
The outlier at Trust Flow 29 is a low quality, site-wide, sidebar link:
Free Bonus Download

Get our free SEO guide to learn how you can
skyrocket your rankings, even in a competitive
niche! Click here to download it for free.

Sidebar Links vs Editorial Links: Yes, It Matters!
Search engines have gotten really good at understanding how to algorithmically de-value low-quality
backlinks.
Google is smart enough to know that lists of links, blogrolls and links that weren’t earned contextually
don’t deserve the same weight as links from paragraph text.
At the URL level, most backlinks have a Citation Flow rating of 19-25, with a significant outlier at 33, which
is an indication that most backlinks are somewhat influential, despite a high probability of site-wide links at
the outlier:

The Citation Flow outlier is yet another sidebar widget link:
Moz’s Spam Score (0-17 scale) recommends reviewing links with a score above 8. Most of Workday’s links
are below the alert threshold:

Mostly branded anchor text reflects a natural profile; however, there should be stronger
signals for non-branded anchors like human resources.
Source: Majestic

Despite site-wide links and a high concentration of backlinks to referring domains,
Workday has a natural link profile and is likely safe from penalization:
Workday has mostly shown a natural link profile, despite 49% of links falling into the caution bucket. These
links should be reviewed manually to determine their fate:

Workday’s top referring domain, nstrm.nl, is a low-quality broken site:

Workday: Conclusions & Next Steps
• A disruptive product = backlink gold.
• Workday has emerged ahead of the pack in a competitive space.
• Build diverse anchor text links.
• Avoid sponsored widget links.
• Disavow Nstrm.nl
• Disavow Danger List URLs.
• Review Caution List.

Final Thoughts
An SEO-savvy in-house marketer with technical chops can likely work with Workday’s
P.R and development teams to implement these recommendations.
If you’re not an SEO-savvy marketer or you just don’t have the time, Single Grain can help you!
We’ve helped business of all sizes improve their marketing ROI, ultimately increasing
revenue – check out some of our case studies here.

HelloFresh (Part 5/10)
By Gaetano DiNardi
HelloFresh delivers weekly recipes and fresh ingredients straight to your door so you can cook delicious,
quick and healthy meals at home. Personally, I’ve never tried their service, but the options look pretty solid
to me.
Analysis of
1 Million Backlinks
1,000,000
www.SingleGrain.com

Key Insights: HelloFresh’s Link Profile
• Total Referring Domains: HelloFresh & Blue Apron are duking it out over the top spot in the quest
for backlinks. At the domain level, Blue Apron is the beast of the ingredient delivery service niche
– acquiring far more links from more referring domains over time than key competitors. While
HelloFresh edges over smaller competitors like Freshly & Home Chef, they’re still chasing Blue Apron
for the crown.
• SEMrush Comparison: Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if all those backlinks made any difference in
organic traffic for Blue Apron. Of course it’s just an estimation, but it looks like Blue Apron is ranking for
more target keywords in higher rank zone positions, therefore earning more traffic.
• SEMrush Traffic Cost Analysis: This is always fascinating to examine. SEMrush provides a rough
estimation of how much a given site’s organic traffic would cost them in paid advertising dollars (great
for making an SEO business case by the way).
• Insight: In this case, although HelloFresh is ranking for less total keywords and earns slightly less traffic,
their traffic cost is approximately $2.4 million more than Blue Apron. This would lead me to believe
that HelloFresh is earning higher quality traffic, or at least ranking for keywords that are bottom funnel
and/or most relevant to business goals.

Source: SEMrush
After data sterilization, approximately 86k live links were found:

The distribution is showing a wide range of referring domains at various strengths,
with the biggest cluster between DA 25-35, and a few outliers at 74-77 (this is actually
quite typical of most sites we’ve reviewed in the study so far):

Cluster at DA 35
Upon inspecting the clusters at DA 25 – 35, there was nothing unnatural about any of the referring
domains. I’d expect a site like HelloFresh to have tons of backlinks from low to mid-tier “mommy
bloggers” and that’s exactly what they have. The example below is a typical link: a mommy blogger
reviews HelloFresh and outlines the process of how it works.
TheBraggingMommy.com
Very common link from a typical mid-tier mommy blog.
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Outliers at DA 74 – 77
Products that disrupt traditional ways of business operation, such as HelloFresh, will naturally attract links
from authoritative domains based on the unique story behind their product. Delivering ingredients to your
home so you can cook without hassle is definitely a disruptor in my eyes.
One interesting way that HelloFresh is acquiring links is by leveraging in-house health professionals to
comment on health subjects, such as “water weight” (see below).
Smart link acquisition strategy – leveraging in-house experts to comment on health topics:
Ahrefs page-level authority skews heavily toward the low end, with a cluster at the 6-10 range, and a
surge of links at zero. These ranges suggest that a significant portion of backlinks are unlikely to move the
needle, despite some links with average authority.

Example of URL Rating Zero
This is an interesting one. You’d expect a URL rating zero backlink to be spam potentially, or site-wide, but
in this case it’s an unknown site scraping existing content from the web to build an audience.
Usually this method is frowned upon, but they’ve credited the original content back to HelloFresh by
specifying the original URL with rel=”canonical” attribute:

The Domain Trust Flow distribution has an extremely strong outlier at 27, an indication
of duplicative site-wide links, some of which may be unnatural:
Learn More: What Is Link Roundup Link Building: The Practical Guide

International SEO: Root to Subdomain Linking
I’d recommend watching this Whiteboard Friday from Moz to get a deeper understanding of how this
works and how it impacts SEO.
At the URL level, most backlinks have a Citation Flow rating of 8-18, an indication that the backlinks from
Majestic’s index are unlikely to be influential:

The Citation Flow outlier is a mommy blogger sidebar widget link:
Moz’s Spam Score (0-17 scale) recommends reviewing links with a score above 8. Most of HelloFresh’s
links are below the alert threshold:

Mostly branded anchor text reflects a natural profile. However, there should be stronger
signals for non-branded anchors like grocery delivery and ingredient delivery.
Source: Majestic

HelloFresh has a very natural link profile and is likely safe from penalization:
A huge number of footer links would likely be a cause for concern, but this is just linking from international
subdomains to the root domain:
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HelloFresh’s top referring domain, mscouponista is a low-quality directory
link site. The rest of them are international subdomain links:
Example of a low-quality sidebar link from mscouponista.com:

HelloFresh: Conclusions & Next Steps
• Leveraging in-house health experts = gold for link acquisition
• HelloFresh is edging smaller competitors, but trailing Blue Apron
• The site has a mostly natural looking link profile, with low risk for penalty
• Build diverse non-branded anchor text links
• Avoid sponsored widget links
• Disavow mscouponista.com
• Disavow Danger List URLs
• Review Caution List

Final Thoughts
An SEO-savvy in-house marketer with technical chops can likely work with
HelloFresh’s P.R. and development teams to implement these recommendations.

Analysis of
Contact Single Grain
1 Million Backlinks
sales@singlegrain.com
1.800.701.0793
www.singlegrain.com
facebook.com/singlegrain
twitter.com/singlegrain
@growth_everywhere
youtube.com/c/Growtheverywhere
pinterest.com/singlegrain
plus.google.com/+Singlegrain
1,000,000
www.SingleGrain.com

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Analysis of

Udemy (Part 1 of 10) . . . . . . Page 8

Airbnb (Part 2 of 10) . . . . . . Page 28

Lyft (Part 3 of 10) . . . . . . Page 44

Workday (Part 4 of 10) . . . . . . Page 62

HelloFresh (Part 5 of 10) . . . . . . Page 76

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those backlinks would impact gains or losses in organic search visibility.

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Newmarksdoor.com. This is your typical DA 30 blog. Upon reviewing

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Example of a high-quality link from Mashable:

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Learn More: Influencer Marketing 101: How to Succeed

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There is no difference between the .com and .org domain:

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Testimonial style videos could be a cool option to explore as well.

Learn More: The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content

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Reclaim Link Equity & Fix Broken Backlink Targets

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Airbnb should fix this 404 immediately!

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I spot-checked a few of the links to confirm the server side errors:

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• Determine if Googlebot is throttling sub-domains

• Fix 404 error: “Best Airbnb Destinations”

• Disavow danger list URLs

• Review caution list