Why it matters on an HVAC site
A natural profile is mostly branded and generic, because people link using the company name or the bare address. A profile that is 40% "ac repair [city]" describes links somebody bought, since nobody writes that sentence naturally.
It is one of the clearest signals of a previous agency’s methods, and it is visible to anyone with a backlink index, including whoever the contractor asks next.
How to check it yourself
- Pull anchors from a backlink index with history set to live and group them into the standard classes.
- Compare the distribution against the sites currently ranking, which sets what normal looks like for that query rather than in the abstract.
- Look at the dates. A concentrated burst of exact-match anchors in one quarter is a campaign.
Worked through in numbers
A contractor’s anchors: 38% exact-match commercial phrases, 21% partial-match, 9% branded, 32% naked URL.
The three ranking competitors sit between 58% and 71% branded, with exact-match under 6% in all three.
The anchors dated to a nine-week window in 2022. Nothing was disavowed, because the links were mostly harmless directories; the work was to earn enough branded links that the old burst stopped being the majority of the profile.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Link building. The spread of words people use when linking to you.