SEO & Link Building Glossary

SEO and link building have their own technical vocabulary that can seem opaque to marketing teams new to organic search. This glossary covers the essential definitions to understand how backlink acquisition really works in competitive niches — from basic concepts to advanced metrics.

Available definitions

• Backlink — A hyperlink from an external website pointing to yours. A fundamental trust signal for Google.
• Domain Authority (DA) — Moz score (0–100) that predicts a domain's ability to rank in SERPs.
• Anchor Text — The clickable text of a link. A major semantic signal for Google about the topic of the target page.
• Link Building — Strategy for acquiring backlinks to increase a site's authority and rankings.

Key terms to know

• Domain Rating (DR) — Ahrefs score from 0 to 100 measuring the strength of a domain's inbound link profile.
• Dofollow / Nofollow — HTML attributes that tell Google whether to pass (or not) PageRank through a link.
• Trust Flow (TF) — Majestic metric that measures the quality of sites linking to a given domain.
• Citation Flow (CF) — Majestic metric that measures the quantity of links pointing to a domain.
• Internal Linking — Network of internal links between pages of the same site, essential for distributing link juice.
• PBN (Private Blog Network) — A private network of artificially created blogs designed to manipulate rankings. Avoid at all costs.

Put it into action

Theory is useful, execution even more so. Once you have these concepts down, the next step is acquiring quality backlinks from verified publishers. Explore the Orbink marketplace and access 330,000+ editorial sites, or create your free account to start with $20 in free credits.