A glossary of evergreen backlinks, for people who publish slowly
Link reports use words that sound alike and mean different things. These twelve entries are the ones that cause the most confusion for slow publishers.
Koi Content editorial team ·
Twelve terms, in plain words
Read them once, bookmark the page, and come back when a report looks odd.
Backlink
A link from another site to a page of yours. Quantity is the weakest thing to measure about it.
Referring domain
A distinct site that links to you. Fifty links from one site count as one referring domain.
Dofollow
A link with no instruction to ignore it. Placements here are permanent dofollow.
Nofollow, sponsored, UGC
Hints that tell Google how to treat a link. Google calls them hints, not commands, since 2019.
Domain Rating
A 0 to 100 score from Ahrefs. Semrush and Moz publish their own, and the three disagree. None of them is a Google metric.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. Natural anchors are boring: a brand, a page name, a plain phrase.
Link decay
The slow loss of links as pages are deleted or sites close. Evergreen posts feel it most, which is why permanence matters.
Link velocity
How fast links arrive. A steady trickle looks like growth; a sudden spike on a young site looks odd.
Canonical
A tag naming the preferred version of a duplicated page. Google treats it as a strong hint.
Topic cluster
A pillar page plus supporting posts that link to each other. It spreads internal links in a deliberate shape.
Donor
The site that carries your link. We list 50,000+ of them, each with its metrics.
Placement
A link put inside an article on a donor site, either a new article or an insertion.
Three mix-ups that waste months
Authority is not traffic. A donor with a high score and almost no readers can look good in a spreadsheet, so check both before you pay, and open the site as a visitor.
Backlinks and internal links do different jobs. Internal links tell Google which of your pages matter most, and the cluster budget treats them together, because the pillar page needs both.
Rank and visibility differ too. A position can hold steady while impressions fall, as searchers drift to AI answers. Our note on AI answers covers that split.
Last, a word on trust. Reports from Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Majestic will not agree on your link count, because each crawls the web differently and updates on its own schedule. Pick one source for trend lines, stick with it, and compare like with like from 2025 into 2026.
When a number looks wrong, check the date of the report first. Stale data explains more surprises than any penalty. Short, but true.
A final tip for 2026: keep a one-page sheet of your own definitions, with the tool each number came from. Future you will be grateful.
Short entries that did not fit above
Is a higher Domain Rating always better?
No. It is a third-party score built from link data, and it ignores relevance. A modest score on a site your readers actually trust is often the better buy than a high score on an unrelated one.
What counts as a good number of referring domains?
There is no fixed figure. Compare against the three pages outranking you for your main query, and aim to sit near them over time rather than to beat them in one quarter.
Where do I wait, and for how long?
The patience calendar sets out windows from one week to twelve months. Start the clock the day the placement goes live, not the day you order.