Glossary
Backlink farming and ten more terms, in plain words
Link sellers speak a private dialect. This glossary translates it for an owner who just wants to know whether a quote is sensible.
Terms that sound alike and mean different things
Read these in any order. Each one comes with the question to ask the next time you meet it in an offer.
Backlink farming
Mass-producing links on sites built mainly to hold links. It is the pattern Google's spam updates target. If a quote sounds like this, walk away.
Backlink exchange
Two site owners agree to link to each other. A few relevant swaps are normal. Large-scale swapping is listed in Google's spam policies as link schemes.
Backlink robot
Software that posts links on its own. Speed is its selling point, relevance is not. Ask what it posts and where.
Backlink crawler
A program that visits pages and records the links it finds, as the indexes behind Ahrefs, Majestic or Moz do. Different crawlers see different slices of the web.
Backlink repository
A stored list of links, such as an export from a tool. A repository tells you what exists, not whether it helps.
Domain backlink
A link coming from a particular domain. Count the domains, not the rows, since fifty links from one site read as one source.
Dofollow
A link without a rel attribute that tells search engines to skip it. Placements here are permanent dofollow.
Domain Rating
Ahrefs' own score from 0 to 100. Useful for comparing rows, but it is not a Google number.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. Vary them and keep them natural.
Donor
The site that carries your link. Choose one a real reader could land on.
Indexing
Google storing a page so it can show it. A link on a page that is not indexed carries no weight.
Where the line sits
Farming is about scale and indifference. Buying one placement on a real blog, chosen by you, is a different act, though Google still treats paid links in its guidelines with caution.
We cannot tell you that a given purchase is safe. We can tell you what to look at: relevance, traffic, count and variety. Start with the first-five checklist.
If the glossary leaves you comparing options rather than words, the scorecard is the next stop.
A last distinction is worth making. Exchanges and farms both involve many links, but a handful of relevant, individually chosen placements looks nothing like either. Count, variety and relevance are what separate them.
Metrics people mix up
Domain Rating belongs to Ahrefs. Domain Authority belongs to Moz. Trust Flow belongs to Majestic. Each tool crawls the web its own way, so a site can be a 52 in one and a 38 in another.
None of them is a Google score, and Google has said it does not use a domain authority number. Treat them like a thermometer in the shop window: handy for comparing, wrong as a promise.
Organic traffic is the better sanity check. A site with a decent score and almost no visitors is a warning sign, because real readers are the thing you came for.
Referring domains deserve a last word. Ten links from ten different sites say more than a hundred from one. Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush all report this count, and so do the rows in our marketplace.
If a seller cannot say which sites you will get, you are not buying links, you are buying hope. See the teardown for the full list of red flags.