How to Filter Spam Links (List Provided) in Ahrefs Using “Best Links” Feature – Update September 2025

The list was updated with 229 new spam domains (now 3.192 total) on December 08, 2025.

Summary

The Irritating Spam Backlink Problem We All Face

If you use Ahrefs for backlink analysis, you’ve likely encountered this frustrating scenario: You open Site Explorer for a domain, see it has 40 referring domains and 90 backlinks, but when you click through, you discover most are garbage links from spammy sites that have crawled the entire internet.

This has been a constant frustration for years. Analyzing backlink profiles usually means sorting through worthless link spam that bloats Ahrefs Site Explorer metrics. The reason why both fresh new websites, as well as domains, expired a couple of years ago:

• Auto-redirect to backlink sellers
• Mass-link to boost their own Ahrefs DR
• Create a redirect to “Instant DR boost” websites
• Generate automated links to every new domain they find
• A link towards affiliate pages maliciously placed on analyzed websites

The result is a completely unrealistic picture of a site’s backlink profile, making proper analysis difficult and time-consuming.

The “Best Links” Filter Solution

During one sleepless night, I decided to tackle this problem. I knew Ahrefs had a “Show me only best links” feature, but the default settings weren’t flexible enough. With just a small adjustment, good links were getting filtered out along with the bad.