Ahrefs API Issues: DomCop will support Ahrefs metrics

05th March 2023 (Update): We have brought back the Ahrefs metrics for DomCop customers. You need to have an active account with Ahrefs to be able to see their metrics at DomCop.

Once you login, you can visit the integration page and authorize DomCop to be able to view Ahrefs metrics. Once done, you will start seeing all Ahrefs metrics.

14th October 2022 (Update): We are currently working on bringing back Ahrefs metrics for all DomCop users that have any active Ahrefs subscription. We will post more updates once the integration is live. Stay tuned!

Ahrefs API Issues

27th June 2019

Three years ago based on customer requests, we contacted Ahrefs about integrating their metrics into DomCop. They agreed to this, and so we purchased a subscription to the Ahrefs API and incorporated their metrics directly into DomCop.

Yesterday, we got an email from Ahrefs stating that they have changed their mind. They want us to stop using their API to show you their metrics. Instead, they want us to enable app integration so that every DomCop customer who wants to filter domains using Ahrefs’ metrics would need to have an Ahrefs account paying at least $399/mo (and maybe more).

We can see why they are doing this – profitability is essential to every company and therefore we hold nothing against them. If there is a chance for them to get every DomCop customer to purchase a costly Ahrefs account, then it makes sense for them to do so. Nevertheless, we are disappointed by this turn of events.

We will, therefore, be removing all Ahrefs metrics from our software in about week from now (3rd July 2019). Apologies to any of you, who have been relying on Ahrefs metrics to find great domains, but there isn’t anything we can do about it. Sorry! 🙁

Luckily, most DomCop customers rely much more on Moz’s Domain Authority 2.0 (the industry standard) and Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow, and so not many customers will be affected by this change.

In a recent test done by Brian Dean (of Backlinko fame), Moz comes out on top in link index size  and finding links to a domain and Domain Authority will continue to be the Gold standard metric in domain link equity analysis. Additionally, Majestic’ Topical Category data is a favorite metric for us, so we are not bothered about DomCop’s ability to find you the best expired domains for your businesses.

However, for those of you who are used to Ahrefs metrics and now need to manually remove them from your saved searches, we are truly sorry. We are happy to manually fix this for you, just email us at support@domcop.com.

While the metrics will be removed on 3rd July 2019, it might take our developers a little longer to remove any mentions of Ahrefs from our website. We will keep this blog post linked from the top header at DomCop until such time.

If there are any other metrics you’d like us to integrate DomCop with, please don’t hesitate in emailing us at support@domcop.com.

28th June 2019

A few customers have asked why we are not doing an app integration with Ahrefs. We did not go into technical details earlier, but it’s something we should explain to our customers.

According to the app integration, the customer’s Ahrefs API units will be used to get the Ahrefs data for the domains. However, the Ahrefs data should be available only to the customer themselves and so should be stored in the customer’s private account.

Now, DomCop gets around 300,000 new domains every day in it’s database – i.e. 9 million new domains every month.  These domains are stored in our database, as well as the metrics from Moz, Majestic, Estibot etc.

According to Ahrefs app integration rules, only those customers who have an Ahrefs account with 9 million rows (API units) can access these metrics, since we will be using their account for getting the metrics for all 9 million. The minimum plan with 9 million rows is the $399/mo Ahrefs Advanced Plan.  (We are not even counting units required for rechecking the domains weekly, or the Archive that has an additional 7 million domains updated every month)

So now for every DomCop customer with an Ahrefs Advanced Plan, we would need to store all domains and ahrefs metrics separately. This would lead to duplicating our data for every such customer and significantly increase the costs of storage.  If DomCop has 100 customers with Ahrefs Advanced Plans, we would need 100 separate databases for these customers.

Apart from technical headaches of managing this, the sheer increase in storage space required would compel us to increase our prices by a few hundred dollars per customer.

Hence the app integration with Ahrefs is simply not possible for DomCop. We’ve tried to explain this to Ahrefs support, but it did not matter.

That said, we understand where Ahrefs is coming from. We pay them a few thousand dollars for their API. They have the opportunity to make a lot more than that from DomCop Customers by forcing the app integration. Unfortunately in this case, every one loses, because the app integration won’t work for us.

10th July 2019

We now get the top 20 Anchor Texts and the top 100 Back links from Majestic. You can read up for more details here.