Glossary
Ahrefs backlink audit reports: a glossary for owners
The PDF is twenty pages long and nobody explained it. Start with the terms below, then decide whether any of it needs your money.
How to use this page
A backlink audit lists the sites that link to yours and grades them. Short, really. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz each produce one, and the grades differ, because each tool crawls its own web. Semrush calls its tool Backlink Audit, Moz has Link Explorer, and Ahrefs has Site Audit plus Site Explorer.
Hold the report in one hand and this page in the other. When a term is unclear, look it up before you agree to a fix.
Our own DR is deliberately simple, so you can reproduce it on a calculator. Twelve hundred referring domains gives a DR around 43, and fifty thousand gives about 65.
The terms, in plain words
Referring domain
A different website that links to you. Thirty links from one site count as one referring domain, and that count is more useful than raw backlinks.
Backlink
A single link from a page. Totals look huge and mislead, because site-wide footers multiply them.
DR, DA and Authority Score
Each vendor's own 0-100 score. Ahrefs says DR, Moz says DA, Semrush says Authority Score. Never compare across tools; our own DR is a log of referring domains only.
Toxic or spam score
A vendor's guess at whether a link is harmful. We do not offer one. Google has said since the 2022 link spam update that its systems mostly ignore bad links rather than punish them.
Disavow
A file you submit to Google through Search Console to say 'ignore these links'. Google calls it an advanced tool and says most sites do not need it.
Dofollow and nofollow
Link attributes. Nofollow, sponsored and ugc tell Google how a link was made. They are hints, so do not read them as an on/off switch.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. A natural profile has mostly brand names, bare URLs and generic phrases.
Link velocity
How quickly links arrive. Agencies use it as a scare word. For a small shop, a steady trickle is normal and a sudden spike deserves a look.
Three habits that stop you overpaying
Ask for the raw list. A PDF with a red 'risk' bar is a summary; the spreadsheet behind it is the evidence. You can check any domain on it yourself with the free lookup in a minute. Ask for it in writing.
Check the date. Google's link spam update arrived in December 2022, and the March 2024 update tightened rules on scaled and expired-domain abuse. An audit that treats a 2012 forum link as an emergency is describing a world that has moved on.
Compare with rivals, not with perfection. Every real site has some junk links. What matters is whether you sit far behind the businesses AI tools and Google keep naming, and the rival checklist shows how to find out.
One more thing. An audit is a snapshot of a monthly-refreshed index, so a link that vanished last week may still be listed.
Ask the agency which index its numbers came from, and when it was last refreshed.
Which exact links are harmful, and what is your evidence? What happens if we do nothing? Which Google update does this relate to, and in which month? A good answer names pages. A bad one points to a score.
