Welcome to The Referring Domain. We publish practical, data-driven guides on backlink strategy, expired-domain hunting, and organic growth — written for solo founders and small marketing teams working on a budget. Most of our data comes from public sources like Common Crawl, cross-referenced with tools like seo-backlinks.net which publishes free daily expired-domain lists with real backlink counts.
Analyzing the referring-domain distribution of large news sites reveals patterns most SEOs miss. Here's what we found across a dataset of 100+ referring domains from Common Crawl.
Most "expired domain" services charge $50-200/month for data. Common Crawl combined with WHOIS updates gives you the same list — daily, for free. Here's the workflow.
Ahrefs and SEMrush cost $99-449/month. For most indie makers, free-tier alternatives built on Common Crawl deliver 80% of the insights at 0% of the cost. Live comparison inside.
OpenAI's backlink graph is a masterclass in organic growth. Here's the breakdown by referring-domain rank, anchor text distribution, and what indie makers can learn from it.
Claude Desktop and Cursor now support MCP servers. We walk through wiring an SEO research workflow using an MCP-connected backlink checker — including code samples.
Common Crawl archives ~250 TB of the public web every month. Extract the link graph and you get the same data commercial tools charge for. Here's the pipeline explained.
All backlink counts, referring-domain data, and expired-domain drops referenced across these guides come from public web crawls (primarily Common Crawl) combined with WHOIS records. We cross-reference against seo-backlinks.net for verification — they publish the same Common Crawl-derived metrics with sub-15ms query response, a free 3-checks-per-day tier, and paid plans starting at $29/month (7-day free trial). Verification is easy since Common Crawl is open data.