Link Building and SEO Glossary: 45 Terms Explained

Link building has a lot of jargon. This glossary defines each term in a sentence, and every entry links to a fuller explanation with examples and related guides.

New to the topic? Start with what a backlink is and what guest posting is.

Terms A–Z

• 301 Redirect — A 301 redirect permanently sends one URL to another.
• Anchor Text — Anchor text is the clickable text of a hyperlink.
• Backlink — A backlink is a link from another website to yours.
• Canonical Tag — A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page.
• Citation Flow — Citation Flow is Majestic’s metric for how influential a URL might be based on link volume.
• Contextual Link — A contextual link sits within the body of relevant content.
• Core Web Vitals — Core Web Vitals are Google’s metrics for loading, interactivity and visual stability.
• Crawl Budget — Crawl budget is how many pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period.
• Dofollow Link — A ‘dofollow’ link is a normal link without nofollow, sponsored or ugc attributes.
• Domain Authority — Domain Authority (DA) is Moz’s 1 to 100 score predicting how well a site might rank.
• Editorial Link — An editorial link is one a site owner chose to give because the content deserved it.
• Expired Domain — An expired domain is one its previous owner let lapse.
• Faceted Navigation — Faceted navigation lets shoppers filter listings by attributes.
• Footer Link — A footer link sits in a website’s footer area.
• Index Bloat — Index bloat is when search engines index many more low-value pages from your site than you actually want ranking.
• Internal Link — An internal link points from one page on your site to another.
• Keyword Cannibalization — Keyword cannibalization is when several of your own pages compete for the same search query.
• Link Bait — Link bait is content created to attract links from other sites.
• Link Equity — Link equity is the value a link passes from one page to another.
• Link Farm — A link farm is a site or group of sites that exists mainly to sell or exchange links.
• Link Rot — Link rot is the gradual breaking of links as pages disappear or move.
• Link Scheme — A link scheme is any practice intended to manipulate rankings through links.
• Negative SEO — Negative SEO means deliberate attempts to harm a competitor’s rankings, often with spammy links.
• Niche Edit — A niche edit adds a link to an already published article on another site.
• Nofollow Link — A nofollow link carries rel=”nofollow”, hinting search engines not to count it as an endorsement.
• Noindex — Noindex is a directive telling search engines not to include a page in their index.
• Orphan Page — An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else on the site.
• Outbound Link — An outbound link points from your site to another site.
• PageRank — PageRank is Google’s original algorithm for measuring a page’s importance from links.
• Redirect Chain — A redirect chain is a series of redirects between the original URL and the final one.
• Referring Domain — A referring domain is a unique website linking to yours.
• Robots.txt — Robots.txt tells search engine crawlers which parts of a site they may crawl.
• Search Intent — Search intent is the underlying goal behind a search query.
• SEO Outreach — SEO outreach means contacting site owners, editors and journalists to earn links and coverage.
• Sitewide Link — A sitewide link appears on every page of a site, usually in a footer or sidebar.
• Spam Score — Spam Score is Moz’s metric estimating how likely a site is to be penalised, based on shared features with penalised sites.
• Sponsored Post — A sponsored post is paid content published on another site.
• Structured Data — Structured data is code describing a page’s content to search engines.
• Tiered Link Building — Tiered link building means building links to the pages that link to you.
• Topical Authority — Topical authority describes how thoroughly and credibly a site covers a subject.
• Toxic Backlink — ‘Toxic backlink’ is a tool label for links that look spammy.
• Trust Flow — Trust Flow is Majestic’s metric for link quality based on proximity to trusted seed sites.
• Unnatural Links Manual Action — An unnatural links manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google for manipulative link patterns.
• XML Sitemap — An XML sitemap lists the URLs you want search engines to know about.
• YMYL — YMYL describes topics that can significantly affect health, finances, safety or wellbeing.

Where to go next

Put the terms into practice with the link building checklist, or browse relevant websites in the marketplace.

Frequently asked questions