This glossary defines every SEO backlinks term you're likely to encounter from a UK or US agency in 2026 — without the jargon, without the upsell, in plain English. Each definition is intentionally short; for the deeper context that drives real buying decisions, follow the linked guides. Bookmark this page — you'll come back to it the next time someone tries to baffle you with acronyms.
A
Ahrefs — the leading SEO toolset. Provides DR (Domain Rating), backlink monitoring, keyword research, rank tracking, and a backlink index larger than any competitor. Industry standard for backlink analysis in 2026. Most working agencies quote DR (Ahrefs) by default.
Anchor text — the clickable text of a hyperlink. Google uses anchor text patterns as a major ranking signal. A natural anchor text mix typically includes 50–60% branded, 20–25% partial-match commercial, 10–15% naked URLs, and 5–10% generic ("click here") anchors. Force aggressive exact-match keyword anchors and you'll trip Google's spam classifier inside a quarter.
Article schema — structured data markup (JSON-LD format) that tells search engines a page is an article, with metadata like author, publish date, and headline. Helps with both classic SEO and AI-engine citation.
Authority — general term for how trusted a website or page is by search engines. Estimated by metrics like DA (Moz) and DR (Ahrefs), but Google has its own internal authority signals (confirmed by the 2024 Content Warehouse leak) which aren't publicly visible. Built primarily through quality backlinks over time.
B
Backlink — a link from one website to another. The fundamental currency of SEO and still the strongest single ranking signal in 2026. Full guide here.
Black-hat SEO — tactics that violate Google's webmaster guidelines (PBNs, paid links, cloaking, doorway pages). Can produce short-term gains and long-term penalties. Almost every modern algorithmic suppression has its origins in black-hat tactics from the previous 12 months.
Branded anchor — anchor text that uses the company or brand name (e.g. "SEO Backlinks", "the team at SEO Backlinks"). The largest segment of a healthy anchor text mix. Signals to Google that links are being earned naturally rather than optimised aggressively.
Broken link building — finding broken links on third-party sites and offering your content as a replacement. Effective in some niches, declining as a tactic in 2026 — most well-maintained sites already have automated link-checkers.
C
Citation Flow (CF) — Majestic SEO's metric for the volume of links pointing to a site. Sister metric to Trust Flow (TF). Less commonly quoted than DR or DA in 2026.
Click-through rate (CTR) — the percentage of users who click on a search result after seeing it. Strong CTR is a positive signal Google uses for ranking, and Google's ranking systems demote results that consistently get fewer clicks than expected for their position.
Cloaking — showing different content to search engines vs human users. Black-hat tactic; will earn manual penalties. Don't do it.
Connectively — the journalist-request platform formerly known as HARO. Rebranded after Cision's 2023 acquisition. Same mechanic — journalists post requests, sources respond — different name. See HARO entry for full context.
Contextual link — a link placed within the body content of a page, surrounded by relevant text. Worth materially more than links in footers, sidebars, or author bios — Google's models weight in-content links significantly higher than chrome-area links.
Crawl budget — the number of pages Google's crawler will visit on your site in a given time period. Matters mostly for very large sites; small/medium sites rarely hit limits.
D
DA (Domain Authority) — Moz's 0–100 score estimating sitewide authority. Updated roughly monthly. Full DR vs DA guide.
Digital PR — earning editorial coverage in news and trade press, primarily for the SEO value of the resulting backlinks. Distinct from traditional PR (focused on brand awareness) and content marketing (focused on owned content). The naming is industry-vocabulary — same offering as "PR backlinks" or "earned media".
Disavow — a Google tool letting you tell Google to ignore specific backlinks pointing to your site. Used defensively when you've acquired toxic links you can't get removed. Most modern SEOs disavow far less than was common in 2018 — Google's ranking systems are now better at discounting bad links automatically.
Dofollow — the default state of an HTML link. Google follows dofollow links and passes ranking signal through them. The opposite is nofollow. Worth noting: dofollow is the absence of an attribute, not an attribute itself.
DR (Domain Rating) — Ahrefs' 0–100 score estimating sitewide authority based largely on backlink profile. Updated daily; industry-standard metric most agencies quote in 2026. Logarithmic scale — going from DR 30 to DR 40 takes roughly 10x the effort of going from DR 20 to DR 30.
E
EAT / E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google's framework for evaluating content quality, particularly for "Your Money or Your Life" topics (health, finance, law). Backlinks contribute to the Authoritativeness pillar.
Editorial link — a link placed by a journalist or editor as part of normal editorial work, not as part of a paid arrangement. The highest-value link type Google recognises. Everything in modern link building is about earning more of these.
Estimated Ad Value (EAV) — a traditional-PR metric calculating what placements would have cost as paid advertising. Largely meaningless for SEO and modern PR measurement — included here because some legacy agencies still quote it. Don't let anyone evaluate your campaign by EAV alone.
F
FAQPage schema — structured data markup for FAQ blocks. Helps win the "People Also Ask" SERP feature and increases the chance of citation in AI Overviews. Implementing FAQ schema is one of the highest-ROI on-page tasks for AI visibility.
Featured snippet — the boxed answer Google shows above the regular results. Won by clear, direct answers in well-structured content. Increasingly being replaced by AI Overviews on commercial queries.
First-touch attribution — crediting the first marketing channel that introduced a lead to your brand. Useful for measuring PR's contribution to pipeline (PR is almost always a first-touch channel that gets buried in last-touch reports).
G
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) — the discipline of optimising content to be cited by AI engines (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot). Overlaps heavily with classic SEO — backlinks and editorial PR placements remain among the strongest signals for AI citation. Full GEO guide.
Google Search Console (GSC) — Google's free tool for tracking how your site performs in search. Shows actual queries, click-throughs, and ranking positions. The single most under-used free tool in SEO.
Guest post — an article written and published on someone else's blog with a link back to your site. Was the workhorse of SEO from 2010 to about 2018. In 2026, scaled paid guest posting is actively flagged by Google's spam classifiers. Selective unpaid guest posts on genuinely high-quality publications still carry signal. Full comparison with PR backlinks.
H
HARO / Connectively — Help A Reporter Out, a service where journalists post requests for expert sources. Responses can earn quote placements with backlinks. Acquired by Cision in 2023, rebranded to Connectively. Successful responses produce real PR backlinks — most "HARO link building" services are simply running this for you with a 30% margin.
HowTo schema — structured data marking step-by-step instructions. Helps win recipe-style and instructional SERP features. Less valuable since AI Overviews started absorbing most "how to" queries directly.
I
Indexed — a page that Google has crawled and added to its searchable index. Pages that aren't indexed cannot rank for any query, regardless of quality. Always check indexation status before commissioning link building to a new page — building links to an unindexed page is wasted effort.
Internal link — a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site. Critical for distributing link equity through your site. Strong internal linking can amplify the ranking impact of a single tier-1 backlink across multiple money pages.
K
Keyword cannibalisation — when multiple pages on the same site compete for the same keyword, hurting rankings for all of them. Fixed by consolidating into a single canonical page. Common in older sites where SEO content was added piecemeal over years.
Keyword difficulty (KD) — a 0–100 estimate of how hard it is to rank for a given keyword. Estimated by Ahrefs, Semrush and others. Useful but imperfect — different tools produce different scores for the same keyword because each one calibrates differently.
L
Link building — the deliberate work of earning more backlinks. The umbrella term for everything from PR outreach to guest posting to broken-link campaigns. Full link building guide.
Link equity (link juice) — the ranking signal that flows through a backlink from the source page to the destination. Greater for higher-authority source pages. Distributed onward through the destination site's internal linking.
Link velocity — the rate at which a site is acquiring new backlinks. Sudden unnatural spikes can trigger spam filters — buying 50 links in a week after a steady baseline of 2 per month is the kind of pattern that earns algorithmic suppression.
Linkable asset — a piece of content (study, survey, interactive tool, original data visualisation) created specifically to attract backlinks through digital PR outreach. The single highest-ROI line item in modern link building when the asset is genuinely original and the underlying data is newsworthy.
M
Manual action — a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google, visible in Google Search Console. Reserved for serious or systematic violations of guidelines. Rarer than algorithmic suppression in 2026, but harder to recover from when applied.
Money page — a page that drives commercial outcomes — pricing pages, comparison pages, category landing pages, key product pages. Where ranking lift translates most directly into revenue. Link building budgets should be heavily concentrated on money pages, not blog content.
Moz — SEO toolset and the original creator of Domain Authority (DA). Less dominant in 2026 than it was a decade ago — most working agencies have moved to Ahrefs as primary tooling.
N
Naked URL — a backlink where the anchor text is the literal URL (e.g. "https://example.com"). A small but healthy share of natural anchor text mixes — typically 10–15%.
Niche edit (link insertion) — a backlink inserted into an existing, already-published article on a third-party site. Distinct from a guest post (which is new content). Cheaper and faster than a guest post; in 2026 most niche-edit inventory comes from networks of sites Google has progressively learned to identify.
Nofollow — a link attribute (rel="nofollow") telling search engines not to pass ranking signal through the link. Common on social media, comment sections, and tier-1 publications. Still passes brand and topical signal even when nofollow — Google's John Mueller has confirmed nofollow links from authoritative sites still factor into ranking.
O
Off-page SEO — everything you do outside your own site to improve rankings — primarily link building and PR. Distinct from on-page SEO. Most of the growth gap between competitors at scale is determined by off-page factors.
On-page SEO — optimisations made on your own site — content, headings, meta tags, internal linking, page speed, schema markup. Necessary but not sufficient on its own — without backlinks, on-page work plateaus quickly on competitive commercial keywords.
Organic traffic — visitors arriving via unpaid search results. Distinct from paid traffic (ads), direct traffic (typing the URL), and referral traffic (clicking links from other sites). The most useful single metric for measuring whether SEO is working.
P
PBN (Private Blog Network) — a cluster of sites built or acquired solely to link to a single "money site". Google identifies and devalues at scale. Anyone offering "DR 70+ from £80" is almost certainly running one. Why this matters.
People Also Ask (PAA) — Google's expandable Q&A box on the SERP. Won primarily through FAQPage schema and direct, declarative answers in content. Increasingly important as SERP real estate as classic blue-link clicks decline.
PR backlink — a backlink earned through PR outreach to a journalist, placed inside an editorial article. The highest-value link type and the only category that reliably moves rankings in 2026. Full service →
Press release distribution — syndicating a single press release to many news outlets via newswire networks (PR Newswire, Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Cision). Useful for breadth on newsworthy announcements. Most resulting links are nofollow; the value comes from cumulative brand signal and occasional editorial pickup. Not a primary link-building tactic in 2026.
R
Rank tracking — monitoring where your site appears in search results for target keywords, over time. Standard tool for any active SEO campaign. Track at the page level (not just the domain level) — different money pages move at different rates.
Reactive PR — pitching expert quotes in response to live journalist requests on platforms like Connectively, Qwoted, ResponseSource. Faster turnaround than proactive PR; lower placement DR on average but a reliable steady drip of placements.
Referring domain — a unique website that links to your site. More important than total backlink count — Google effectively de-duplicates multiple links from the same domain. 50 referring domains will almost always outperform 500 backlinks from 5 sites.
rel="sponsored" — a newer link attribute (introduced 2019) for paid placements. Treated similarly to nofollow but more specifically labelled. Google's official preference for marking up paid links.
rel="ugc" — link attribute for user-generated content (forums, comments). Treated similarly to nofollow. Common on Q&A sites and comment sections.
S
Schema markup — structured data (usually JSON-LD format) that tells search engines what a page is about with explicit metadata. Helps SEO and AI-engine citation. Most under-used technical SEO tactic in 2026 — implementing schema on key pages is one of the highest-ROI on-page tasks.
Semrush — major SEO toolset, alternative to Ahrefs. Strong in keyword research and competitive intelligence; backlink index slightly smaller than Ahrefs in most categories.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) — the page of results Google shows for a given query. Increasingly populated by AI Overviews, featured snippets, and other rich features in addition to the classic 10 blue links. Many commercial SERPs in 2026 show only 3–4 organic results above the fold.
Sitemap — a file listing all the pages on your site. Submitted to Google Search Console to help crawling. Critical for sites with many pages or complex navigation.
T
Tier-1 publication — a top-authority news outlet (Forbes DR 95, BBC DR 95, Bloomberg DR 92, Reuters DR 92, the Daily Mail DR 94, the Guardian DR 93). Backlinks from these are worth significantly more than mid-tier or niche placements — both for direct ranking signal and for brand-trust signals visible to anyone Googling your company name.
Topical authority — how comprehensively a site covers a specific topic. Built through clusters of related content + backlinks from category-relevant sources. Increasingly important post-2023 as Google's ranking systems weight topic-level expertise higher than ever.
Trust Flow (TF) — Majestic SEO's metric for the quality of links pointing to a site. Sister metric to Citation Flow (CF). Less commonly quoted than DR or DA in 2026.
U
UTM parameters — tracking codes added to URLs to track traffic source in analytics. Critical for measuring PR's contribution to specific deals — without UTM-tagged links, PR-driven traffic gets misattributed in standard last-touch reports.
W
White-hat SEO — tactics that align with Google's webmaster guidelines. The opposite of black-hat. Also a synonym for "ethical" SEO in industry conversation.
White-label — services delivered for a partner agency to resell under their own brand. Common in link building (an agency hires a specialist link-building firm and presents the work to their own clients). White-label retainers usually carry a 10–20% premium over direct retainers because of the additional reporting and confidentiality requirements.
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