SEO & Link Building Glossary

This glossary defines common terms you’ll see in our process and reports. It’s intentionally plain-English (no "SEO Mad Libs").

Core link terms

Anchor text

The clickable text of a link. Example: in “white label guest posting”, that phrase is the anchor. We typically prefer branded or natural anchors to keep profiles safe and believable.

Dofollow link

A normal link that search engines can crawl and may use for ranking signals. (In HTML, this is usually just a standard <a> link with no rel="nofollow" attribute.)

Nofollow link

A link with rel="nofollow" (or other "link relationship" attributes) that signals the publisher doesn’t want to pass traditional ranking credit. Nofollow links can still be valuable for relevance, discovery, and traffic.

Referring domain

A unique website (domain) that links to you. Ten links from one domain is still one referring domain. Healthy link profiles generally have a mix of domains and page-level links.

Indexing

When Google discovers a page and adds it to its searchable index. A link can’t help SEO if the page isn’t indexed (and ideally, stays indexed).

Placement & process

Guest post

An article published on a third-party site (a publisher) that includes one or more contextual links. In our process, this usually includes outreach, editorial review, writing, revisions, and publication.

White label

Link-building infrastructure operated behind-the-scenes for your clients — fully visible to you — so your agency remains client-facing. We don’t use your client’s branding publicly, and we don’t publish client logos or testimonials.

Quality & risk

For the complete quality and vetting criteria behind these terms in our delivery process, see our Editorial Standards.

PBN (Private Blog Network)

A network of sites built primarily to sell links. These can be risky and are not aligned with sustainable, brand-safe SEO. We avoid obvious PBN footprints and link-farm behavior.

DA / DR (third-party authority metrics)

Metrics like "DA" (Moz) or "DR" (Ahrefs) attempt to estimate a domain’s authority. They can be useful for comparisons, but they’re not Google metrics, and they shouldn’t be the only decision factor.