Backlink test for an app landing page, step by step
You shipped version 1.0, the landing page is live, and nobody can tell you who links to it. Five steps get you a first report in about ten minutes.
LinksApp research team ·
The five steps
1. Decide which domain you are testing
Apps often have two: yourapp.com for marketing and app.yourapp.com or yourapp.io for the product. Test the marketing domain first. Product subdomains rarely collect links from outside.
2. Run the free lookup
Open the DR checker on the home page or call action=overview&q=yourapp.com with no key. You get a Domain Rating and the counts that feed it. Write the date next to the number.
3. Sign in and copy a key
Google sign-in only. The account starts with $100 of credit, so the paid calls in the next steps cost fractions of a cent.
4. Pull referring domains, sorted by DR
Call action=refdomains&q=yourapp.com&sort=dr&order=desc&per=100. It costs 2 credits. Read the top twenty rows by hand; the long tail is noise at this stage.
5. Pull top pages
action=toppages shows which URLs on your domain hold the links. If your docs outrank your home page here, that tells you where launch attention really went.
What a first report usually looks like for a young app
Small. That is normal. A new app domain often has a few dozen referring domains, and most of them are directories, a launch post or two, and your own accounts on GitHub or Product Hunt.
Treat the first report as a baseline rather than a verdict. The index refreshes roughly once a month, so a mention from last week may not be visible, and a lookup on launch day mostly shows the world before launch.
Hypothetical example, invented for illustration. A to-do app domain shows 38 referring domains and a DR of 22. The DR formula is round(100 times log(ref_domains+1) divided by log(2 times 10^7)). With 38 domains the log of 39 is about 3.66 and the log of 20,000,000 is about 16.8, so the ratio rounds to 22. Real domains will show their own counts.
Which call to run, and what it costs
| Question you have | Action | Credits | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is my DR? | domain or overview | 0 | Free |
| Who links to me? | refdomains | 2 | $0.0002 |
| Which pages are linked? | toppages | 2 | $0.0002 |
| What words do people use? | anchors | 2 | $0.0002 |
| How do I compare with 3 rivals? | compare | 1 | $0.0001 |
Three mistakes in a first test
Testing the wrong host. If the marketing site sits on www and you look up the bare domain, the counts can differ. Try both forms and write down which you used.
Counting your own links. Your GitHub profile, your social accounts and your Product Hunt page link to you, and they are fine, but they are not independent mentions.
Reading too much into DR. A new app with 38 referring domains and a rival with 3,800 will have very different scores because the scale is logarithmic, so the real question is what sort of domains are in the list.
Sort by DR, read the top twenty, and ask whether a real person would have placed each link.
Your App Store or Google Play page lives on someone else's domain. Start with the domain you own, then read the store page against web page comparison.
What to do with the numbers
Pick one thing. If three rivals each have ten times your referring domains, the gap is real and a cheap competitor overlap check tells you which sites cover them but not you.
If the gap is small, spend the week on the product. Google's March 2024 core update aimed at unhelpful, low-quality pages, so a landing page with a clear description and a real changelog beats another round of directory submissions.
Check again next month. One row in a spreadsheet is enough. When something looks off, open the troubleshooting table.