Help and support

An empty badge means one of three things, and the icon has no room to say which, so the popup does. Open it and the badge row will tell you if the hourly lookup limit is the reason. The three:

• The hourly limit. The badge looks up at most 50 sites it has not seen before per hour. Sites you have already visited are cached for a day and cost nothing, so ordinary browsing does not reach it. It resets on the hour.
• Ahrefs has no rating for that domain. Common on brand new sites. A blank is honest here: we will not print a 0 that was never measured.
• The lookup failed. No connection, or our API was briefly unreachable. The next visit tries again.

The number in the popup is read fresh every time you open it, which is why it can show a number while the icon beside it is blank.

Then the link is probably real and the extension cannot prove it from inside a tab. Some directories point their outbound button at a redirect they control so they can count the click, so no anchor on the page carries your domain even though the listing is live. Reading the page alone, that looks identical to never having been listed. Following the hop is what tells the two apart, and it is one of the checks ShipDR runs on the server for listings you track.

Because it hands back answers you wrote. The Domain Rating and the link check need no account and never will: they read public data and your own page. The kit returns your saved tagline, description, logo URL and the rest, which only exists because you are signed in here. Nothing about the form you are filling is sent anywhere: it is read in the tab, matched inside the popup, and the report of what was filled never leaves your browser.

By design, and it tells you which. Fields are matched on what the form itself says rather than on a hand-kept list of directories, so it works on a site nobody has mapped and keeps working after a redesign. The cost is that it is sometimes unsure, and an unsure box is left alone rather than guessed at. It reports what it filled, the answers no box asked for as copy buttons, and the boxes it could not identify. It never submits: you check, then you press the button. A file upload always needs you to pick the file.

Showing the number without opening the popup means reading the address of tabs you open, and Chrome describes that as reading your browsing history. It is an optional permission: off until you tick the box, requested then rather than at install, and removed again when you untick it. That is why installing ShipDR asks for less than most SEO toolbars, which declare the same access as required so it lives inside the Add to Chrome dialog and is never mentioned again.

Only that no noindex tag is present, which is a different claim. An X-Robots-Tag header or a rule in the directory’s robots.txt can still keep the page out of Google, and neither is visible from inside a browser tab. ShipDR reads both on the server for listings you track.

See the counter hop above. The extension reports what it found, never what it concludes.

There is no schedule and no history in the extension. A link that is dofollow today can go nofollow, get noindexed, or vanish, and nothing in your browser is watching for that. That is the job of the tracker on this site, not of the toolbar.

A nofollow link still sends real visitors, and a healthy backlink profile has plenty of them. It only reads as a bad trade when you paid a permanent homepage slot for it, which is why ShipDR flags nofollow on badge swaps and not on ordinary listings.

The hostname of the tab you are looking at, to read that domain’s public Domain Rating: when you open the popup, and, with the badge on, when you visit a site. Each host is looked up at most once a day. That is the whole list.

The domain you name as your own, which is stored in your browser only. The content of any page. Any URL beyond that bare hostname. Your browsing history. There are no analytics and no ads in the extension, and no profile of you anywhere. Links from the popup to this site carry a tag naming which panel they came from and nothing about you.

Uninstalling removes everything: the domain you saved and the cached ratings live in the extension’s own storage, so they go with it. Nothing about the extension is kept on our servers to delete. For a ShipDR account, see Privacy.