Understanding Backlinks and Referring Domains# Link to this article
A backlink is one link. A referring domain is one linking site, however many links it sends. The difference explains most confusing backlink comparisons.
These two numbers are reported side by side everywhere in Rankato, and they answer different questions.
Backlinks# Link to this section
Every individual link pointing at the target, counted once per source URL. A site with a link to you in its footer on 40,000 pages contributes 40,000 backlinks.
Referring domains# Link to this section
The number of distinct sites linking to the target. That same footer link contributes one referring domain.
Referring domains is the more useful comparison metric, because it is much harder to inflate. A domain with 2,000 backlinks from 15 referring domains is a very different proposition from one with 2,000 backlinks from 900.
Attributes Rankato records# Link to this section
- Follow / nofollow — whether the link passes a ranking signal, taken from the actual
relattribute on the page. - Anchor text — the visible text of the link.
- First seen — when the link first appeared in the corpus.
- Last verified — when Rankato's crawler last confirmed the link is still live.
Why links disappear# Link to this section
A link can be removed, the page can be deleted, the page can start returning an error, or the link can be changed to nofollow. Rankato marks links as lost only after its own crawler confirms it — not on the first failed fetch, because a single timeout is not evidence of removal.
Written by Rankato