Total backlinks, DR and the rest: a glossary for bloggers
Link offers love jargon. This glossary translates the words you will meet, with a note on where each one can mislead you.
Grace Blogging editorial team ·
How to use this page
Keep it open in a second tab while you read an offer or browse the marketplace. Every term is explained in one or two sentences, with the trap that usually goes with it.
The words, in the order you will meet them
Term
What it means
Where it misleads
Backlink
A link from another site to yours
Not all are equal. One from a real blog outweighs many from empty pages.
Total backlinks
Every link pointing at your site, counting repeats from the same site
Sixty links from one footer inflate it. Look at referring domains too.
Referring domains
The number of different sites that link to you
Fewer than total backlinks, and the number most people should watch.
Dofollow
A link that passes ranking credit
Our placements are dofollow, which is useful and also why Google's link spam policy applies.
Nofollow, sponsored, UGC
Link attributes that tell Google to treat a link with caution
Paid links are meant to carry rel="sponsored".
Domain Rating (DR)
An Ahrefs estimate of a site's link strength, 0 to 100
A tool's score, not something Google reports.
Organic traffic
Visits from search, estimated by tools
An estimate, and it can dip or jump after core updates.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link
Over-polished wording looks engineered. See the anchor notes.
Donor
The site that carries the link to you
A cheap donor is not automatically a poor one, but check it.
PR9
An old PageRank label
Google removed the public score in March 2016, so the number is invented.
Link spam
Links made mainly to manipulate rankings
Google's SpamBrain and spam updates target it, with no neat boundary.
Search Console
Google's free tool for your own site
Its Links report shows what Google has seen, not everything that exists.
Two numbers worth writing in a notebook
Before you buy anything, write down your referring domains and your impressions in Search Console for the post you care about. Date both.
It sounds fussy. It is the only way you will know later whether anything changed.
Then wait. Google's core updates, such as the one in March 2024, can move a lifestyle blog for reasons that have nothing to do with links, so give any change eight weeks and look for a trend. If you do decide to order, the walkthrough for a first order shows how little it takes, and the bulk-offer teardown shows what to refuse.
A number checker is only half the picture
Before you buy anything, write down your referring domains and your impressions in Search Console for the post you care about. Date both. A paper notebook works as well as a spreadsheet, and it will not be lost when a tool changes its screens.
Read them calmly. They will not agree.
Each tool crawls the web differently, so your total backlinks will differ between them by a surprising margin. Note one figure from one tool today, and compare only against that same tool in two months, rather than hopping between dashboards looking for a bigger number.