backlinks, explained.
a backlink is a link from another website to yours. search engines treat it as a vote, one site spending its own reputation to point at another, which is why links still carry weight and why the number of them matters far less than who they come from.
this topic collects every concept you need to read a backlink report without being misled by it: how a backlink differs from a referring domain, what anchor text and nofollow actually signal, what the vendor authority scores do and do not measure, and the narrow case where a bad link is worth acting on. new to this? read in order. otherwise, jump to the question you have.
the fundamentals
what a link is, how links get counted, and how long they take to count.
what is a backlink graph - nodes, edges, and where authority scores come from
a backlink graph is the web drawn as nodes (sites or pages) and edges (links). every authority score is different math over a graph of that shape.
9 min readreferring domain vs backlink - the difference
a backlink is one link. a referring domain is one site - it can give you ten thousand links and still count as one. google weighs referring domain count more heavily than raw backlinks, and the ratio between them is itself a quality signal.
7 min readwhat is link building - the honest, short version
getting other sites to link to yours, why the count stopped mattering, and the three approaches that still work sorted by how much of your time they waste.
6 min readhow long does google take to count a backlink?
"how long for google to count a backlink" is actually three questions: how long to crawl, how long to index, and how long for it to influence rankings. the answers are days, weeks, and months - and each phase has different bottlenecks.
8 min read
what a link signals
the two properties of a link that change what it says about the page it points at.
anchor text, explained - what it is, what it signals, and where it actually pays
the clickable words of a link are an independent description of your page. here is why that matters, what a natural profile looks like, and why internal anchors are the half worth working on.
8 min readnofollow links - what they are, whether they help, and why some tools cannot see them
rel=nofollow became a hint in 2019, not a directive. what that changed, when to use sponsored and ugc instead, and the layer problem behind link-attribute reporting.
7 min read
scores and risk
the numbers vendors sell, and the links people worry about.
domain authority vs domain rating vs trust flow - what the scores actually measure
four vendors, four 0-100 numbers, none of them google's. what each one is computed from, why they never agree, and the only way to read them that survives contact with reality.
8 min readtoxic backlinks and the disavow file - the unpopular, accurate version
toxic is a vendor word, not a google one. what the score actually is, the narrow case where disavow is correct, and why the default answer is to do nothing.
7 min read