The terms you’ll meet when buying guest posts and building links, in plain English. Each definition is short. Where we’ve written more on a topic, the definition links to it.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. Descriptive anchors help readers and search engines understand the linked page, but repeating the same keyword-rich anchor across many paid links looks manipulative.
Backlink
A link from another website to yours. Links from relevant sites with real readers are one of the signals search engines use to judge a page’s importance.
Canonical URL
The version of a page you tell search engines to treat as the main one when several URLs show the same content. See Shopify duplicate URLs for a common example.
Domain Authority (DA)
A score from 1 to 100 created by Moz to estimate a site’s ranking strength from its links. It is not a Google metric.
Domain Rating (DR)
A score from 0 to 100 created by Ahrefs that estimates the strength of a site’s backlink profile. It’s easy to inflate, so it should be read alongside organic traffic. See what is a good DR for guest posts.
Dofollow link
An informal name for a standard link with no nofollow, sponsored or ugc attribute. “Dofollow” isn’t an actual HTML attribute.
Guest post
An article published on someone else’s website, usually with a link back to the author’s site. When the placement is paid, Google asks for the link to be marked sponsored or nofollow. See our guest posting services.
Indexing
Google adding a page to its index, which is required before the page can appear in search results. A link on a page that isn’t indexed has little effect.
Link farm
A website, or group of websites, that exists mainly to sell links rather than to serve readers. See 9 signs a site is a link farm.
Link insertion (niche edit)
A link added to an article that’s already published, instead of a new article. See guest posts vs niche edits.
Link scheme
Google’s term for links intended to manipulate rankings, such as buying links that pass ranking credit, large-scale link exchanges or links from networks of low-quality sites.
nofollow
A link attribute (rel="nofollow") telling search engines not to associate the two pages or pass ranking credit. Google treats it as a hint. See rel=”sponsored” vs nofollow.
Organic traffic
Visitors who arrive from unpaid search results. SEO tools estimate it for other sites, and it’s harder to fake than authority scores, which makes it a better guide to site quality.
Outreach
Contacting website owners or editors to propose an article, a link or a partnership.
Private blog network (PBN)
A group of websites controlled by one party and used to link to other sites to boost their rankings. PBNs fall under Google’s link spam policies.
Referring domain
A unique website that links to yours. Ten links from one site count as one referring domain.
rel=”sponsored”
A link attribute that marks a link as paid or sponsored. It’s what Google recommends for guest posts, sponsored articles and other paid placements.
rel=”ugc”
A link attribute for user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
Topical relevance
How closely a linking site and page match your topic. A link from a site your customers actually read usually matters more than a high authority score.
White-label link building
Link building done by a provider and resold by an agency under its own brand, with unbranded reports. See white-label link building.
Ready to buy guest posts on checked sites? See our guest posting services or get a free site list for your niche.