Links

Anchor text

Link text

The visible, clickable text of a hyperlink, used by search engines as a description of the destination page.

Backlink

Inbound link · External link

A hyperlink from one website to another, historically the strongest external signal search engines use to judge a page's importance and relevance.

Broken link building

Finding dead outbound links on third-party pages and suggesting your equivalent resource as a replacement.

Co-citation and co-occurrence

The pattern of two entities being mentioned or linked together by third parties, which helps search engines infer that they are related.

Digital PR

SEO PR

Earning editorial coverage and links from media outlets through newsworthy assets — original data, expert commentary, campaigns — rather than link placement.

Disavow links tool

Disavow file

A Search Console tool for asking Google to ignore specified inbound links or domains, intended for sites with a link-related manual action or known paid links.

Guest posting

Guest blogging · Contributed articles

Writing articles for other publications; legitimate as an audience and authority tactic, but a link spam violation when done at scale primarily for keyword-rich links.

Internal linking

Internal links

Links between pages on the same site, which control crawl paths, distribute link equity, and communicate topical relationships and page importance.

Journalist sourcing platforms

HARO · Connectively · Qwoted · Featured

Services that connect journalists seeking expert sources with people willing to comment, historically a route to earning media links and citations.

Link building

Link acquisition · Link earning

The practice of acquiring links from other websites, ranging from editorially earned citations to schemes that violate Google's link spam policy.

Link equity

Link juice · Authority flow

The ranking value passed through a hyperlink, influenced by the linking page's own authority, its relevance, its number of outbound links and the link's attributes.

Link farm

Link network · Link wheel

A group of sites that link to each other extensively for the sole purpose of inflating link counts, with no editorial reason for the links.

Link graph

Web graph

The network of all pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, over which link-based ranking algorithms such as PageRank are computed.

Link profile

Backlink profile

The aggregate characteristics of all links pointing to a site: source diversity, anchor text distribution, follow ratio, topical relevance and acquisition pattern over time.

Link reclamation

Broken backlink recovery

Recovering link equity that a site already earned but lost, usually because linked URLs now 404, redirect poorly, or were dropped in a migration.

Link spam

Link schemes

Google's spam policy category covering links intended to manipulate rankings: buying or selling links, excessive exchanges, automated link creation and low-quality directory…

Link velocity

Link growth rate

The rate at which a site or page acquires new backlinks over time; abrupt, unexplained spikes are a common signature of manipulation.

Linkable asset

Link bait

Content designed to earn links on its own merit — original research, free tools, definitive references, interactive data — rather than through solicitation.

Negative SEO

Attempts to damage a competitor's rankings, typically by pointing spam links at their site, scraping their content, or fabricating removal requests.

PageRank

PR

Google's original link-analysis algorithm, which scores a page's importance by the number and importance of pages linking to it, computed recursively.

Private blog network

PBN

A set of websites, often built on expired domains, controlled by one party for the purpose of passing links to money sites; a clear link spam violation.

Reciprocal links

Link exchange

Two sites linking to each other; unremarkable when it reflects a real relationship, a link spam violation when exchanges are excessive or systematic.

Referring domains

Linking root domains · RDs

The number of unique domains linking to a site or page, generally a more meaningful measure of link popularity than raw backlink count.

Third-party authority metrics

DR · DA · Authority Score · Domain Authority · Domain Rating

Vendor-calculated 0-100 scores estimating a domain's link strength — Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, Semrush Authority Score, Majestic Trust Flow — none of which Google uses.

Toxic links

Bad links · Spammy backlinks

A vendor term for backlinks judged harmful by a third-party tool's scoring; Google has repeatedly said it has no such classification and simply ignores links it distrusts.

Unlinked mentions

Brand mentions

References to a brand, product or person in published content that do not include a hyperlink, and which can sometimes be converted into links.