Link building and mentions glossary
- Anchor text
- The clickable words of a link. Search engines read it as a hint about the linked page's topic.
- Backlink
- A link from another site to yours. Backlinks from relevant, trusted sites help search rankings.
- Brand mention
- Any reference to a company name on another site, with or without a link.
- Contextual link
- A link placed inside the body text of an article, as opposed to a footer, sidebar or directory listing.
- Dofollow link
- A link without a nofollow attribute. Search engines may pass ranking signals through it.
- Domain rating
- Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the strength of a site's backlink profile, on a logarithmic scale.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality rater guidelines ask raters to assess.
- Earned media
- Coverage and mentions a company gets from others without paying for placement.
- Generative engine optimization
- Work aimed at getting a brand named in answers from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews.
- Guest post
- An article written by one company and published on another company's site, usually with a link back.
- Link building
- Getting other sites to link to yours through outreach, content, PR or partnerships.
- Link exchange
- Two sites agreeing to link to each other. Direct reciprocal swaps at scale are named in Google's spam policies.
- Link scheme
- Google's term for links meant to manipulate rankings, including paid links and excessive exchanges.
- Link velocity
- The rate at which a site gains new backlinks over time.
- Nofollow
- A link attribute (rel="nofollow") asking search engines not to pass ranking credit through the link.
- Outbound link
- A link from your site to another site.
- Referring domain
- A distinct website that links to yours. Ten links from one site count as one referring domain.
- A paid link, which Google asks publishers to mark with rel="sponsored".
- Three-way link exchange
- Site A links to B, B links to C, and C links to A, so no two sites link directly to each other.
- Topical relevance
- How closely the linking page's subject matches the linked page's subject.