Link Building Glossary

The clickable words a link is wrapped in. It tells readers and search engines what the destination page is about.

In a partner request, the anchor line reveals more about intent than the rest of the email. Someone who says use whatever wording fits your sentence is behaving differently from someone who supplies an exact commercial phrase.

The mix of branded, generic, partial match and exact match anchors across a whole backlink profile.

Judged as a pattern rather than link by link. A profile where the same commercial phrase appears across dozens of unrelated sites did not happen by accident, and it is the first thing an auditor pulls.

A link on another website that points to a page on yours. Search engines read it as a signal that somebody else found the page worth referencing.

Not all backlinks carry the same weight. Relevance, placement on the page, and the attributes on the link all change what it is worth, which is why a raw backlink count says very little on its own.

The crawl database a link tool builds and reports from. Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz and Semrush each maintain their own.

The reason two tools disagree about how many links a site has. Neither is lying, and neither sees what Google sees.

Anchor text that is simply the company, product, or site name.

The default shape of a link somebody gave you voluntarily, which is why a profile made almost entirely of keyword anchors reads as arranged rather than earned.

Two sites being mentioned together on the same page, whether or not either is linked.

An industry theory about how search engines infer relationships between brands. Treat it as a reason to want mentions alongside your competitors, not as a mechanism anyone can measure.

A link inside the body copy of a page, surrounded by text that explains why it is there.

The format worth asking for. Everything else on a page, footers, sidebars, author boxes, is a slot rather than a reference.

A backlink pointing at an internal page rather than the homepage.

Most link building aims at deep links, because the page you want to rank is rarely the homepage. A profile made almost entirely of homepage links usually means the links were arranged rather than earned by a specific piece of content.

A link an author placed because it genuinely helped the piece, with nothing traded for it.

This is the standard every other method is measured against. When people argue about whether a tactic is safe, they are usually arguing about how closely it resembles this.

Anchor text that matches the target page's target keyword word for word, such as linking the phrase link exchange software to a page about link exchange software.

One is nothing. The same commercial phrase repeated across a dozen partners is a pattern, and it is the most common self-inflicted footprint in link building.

The long-standing industry observation that when a page links to the same URL twice, only the first anchor is counted.

Google has never confirmed it and no current test settles it. Worth knowing because partners sometimes offer a second link on a page that already links to you, which is a smaller favor than it sounds.

An ordinary link with no rel attribute limiting how search engines treat it.

There is no rel="dofollow" in the specification. Follow is simply the default state of a link, and the word only exists because nofollow needed an opposite.

Anchor text with no descriptive content: click here, read more, this article.

Common in genuine editorial writing, and useless to a reader using a screen reader. Its presence in a profile is a sign of links nobody negotiated.

A link wrapped around an image rather than text. Search engines read the image's alt text in place of anchor text.

Logo placements on partner and sponsor pages are almost always image links, which is why a partnership can produce a link with no anchor text at all.

A link between two pages on the same domain. Nothing to negotiate, and entirely under your control.

Internal linking decides how far a new backlink's value spreads once it lands. A hard won link to a page nothing else on your site links to is a wasted opportunity.

The umbrella term for however a link came to exist: earned, asked for, traded, or bought.

Worth recording per link, because acquisition method is the thing an audit needs and the thing nobody writes down. Two identical looking links from the same domain can carry completely different risk depending on how each one was obtained.

The practice of earning or arranging links from other websites, as a deliberate activity rather than a byproduct.

It spans methods with very different risk profiles, from digital PR and original research through to outreach, guest contributions, and partnership swaps.

How varied a backlink profile is across sources, formats, anchors, and target pages.

A useful sanity check rather than a target to optimize toward. Profiles built one way look built, whichever way that was.

The ranking value a link is believed to pass to the page it points to.

No search engine publishes the mechanics, so every number attached to this concept is an estimate produced by a third party tool. Useful as a comparison, not as a measurement.

The map of which pages link to which, across the whole web, as a search engine sees it.

Almost every risk discussed on this page comes down to what a pattern looks like on that map. A direct swap is a two node loop, which is the easiest shape in the world to query for.

The company your links keep: the other sites that a linking page or network also points to.

Worth a look before accepting a placement. A page linking to you, a casino, and a payday loan site has told you which neighborhood it is in.

The full set of backlinks and referring domains pointing at a site, taken together rather than one at a time.

Individual links rarely cause problems. Patterns across the profile do, which is why audits look at anchor distribution and acquisition method rather than judging each link on its own.

The web-wide tendency for URLs to stop resolving over time as pages move, sites close, and domains lapse.

Link decay is what link rot looks like from inside your own profile. It is also what makes broken link building possible.

How quickly a site gains new backlinks over a period of time.

Worth watching as your own trend line. Treat any claim about a safe monthly rate as guesswork, because nobody outside a search engine can see where a threshold would sit.

A link whose anchor text is the URL itself, such as https://example.com.

A backlink profile shaped by other people's independent decisions rather than by one team's process.

Nobody can define it precisely, which is why the term gets abused. In practice it means variety in every dimension at once: sources, anchors, target pages, formats, and timing.

Everything influencing rankings from outside your own site: links, brand mentions, and reputation signals.

Link building is the part of off-page SEO you can actually run as a repeatable process, which is why it absorbs most of the budget.

A link on your site pointing to a different domain. Your outbound links are somebody else's backlinks.

That symmetry is the whole basis of link exchanges. It is also why a page stuffed with unrelated outbound links tells you exactly what it was built for.

Google's original algorithm for scoring a page by the links pointing at it, weighted by how strong those linking pages are themselves.

The public toolbar score was retired in 2016 and no current number is published. The idea behind it, that a link is a vote whose weight depends on the voter, is still what every third party link metric is trying to approximate.

Anchor text containing your target keyword alongside other words, such as this guide to link exchange software.

The most natural looking of the keyword anchors, and the one a careful editor writes without being asked.

A unique website that links to you at least once, however many individual links it sends.

Fifty links from one blog is one referring domain. Domain counts describe reach, link counts describe volume, and confusing the two is how a profile looks stronger on paper than it is.

The specific URL a backlink sits on, as opposed to the domain it belongs to.

The unit that actually matters when someone offers you a placement. A strong domain can hand you a link on a page with no traffic, no rankings, and forty other outbound links on it.

Finding a dead page that other sites still link to, then offering your equivalent page as the replacement.

It works because you are fixing something for the site owner rather than asking for a favor. It scales poorly, which is generally a sign a method is legitimate.

A page whose job is to hold outbound links to partners.

Fine when the partners are real and a reader would want the list. Google's spam policies name partner pages that exist exclusively for cross-linking, so the test is whether the page would still be there if links counted for nothing.

Earning links by giving journalists and publishers something worth covering: original data, research, expert comment, or a story.

Slower and less predictable than trading links, and the links it produces are the ones that survive a policy update, because somebody chose to give them.

Two sites publishing guest articles on each other, each carrying a link home.

It looks more editorial than a straight swap because there is an article around it. It is still a swap, and the same questions about relevance and volume apply.

Writing an article for another publication, usually with a link back to your own site in the body or the author bio.

Google's policies target guest posts published at scale with keyword-rich links, not the practice itself. A contribution written for that audience by someone who knows the subject is a different thing from a hundred spun articles.

How many links you have given a partner measured against how many you have received.

It goes lopsided quietly. Each individual favor looks reasonable, and then a partner is four links up and nobody noticed because the count lived in somebody's memory.

The agreement itself: which page links to which, with what anchor, by when, and what goes back the other way.

Almost every dispute in a partnership traces back to a term that was agreed in an email thread and never written down anywhere both sides could see.

Any arrangement where one site links to another and gets a link back as part of the deal.

The mechanism varies from a two line email to a brokered platform. The trade does not. Google's spam policies name excessive exchanges specifically, so scale and intent are what decide whether a given swap is a problem.

Comparing your referring domains against competitors to find sites that link to them and not to you.

A prospecting shortcut rather than a strategy. A site linking to three of your competitors has already shown it will link to a company like yours.

Adding a link into an article that has already been published, rather than commissioning a new one.

Faster than a guest post and easier to place badly, because the surrounding paragraph was not written with your link in mind. If the sentence had to be rewritten to fit it, a reader can tell. It differs from an exchange in what is traded: an insertion is usually bought or asked for outright, while an exchange pays for the link with a link back.

A site or contact you have an ongoing linking relationship with, as opposed to a one-off prospect.

Worth separating in your records. Partners have history, agreed terms, and a balance. Prospects have none of that yet.

Turning an existing unlinked brand mention into a link, or restoring a link that was removed.

Usually the cheapest links available to a company that already gets written about, because the editorial decision to reference you has already been made.

A single live link on a specific URL, as distinct from the deal that produced it.

One deal can produce several placements, and a placement outlives the deal. Reports that count deals rather than live placements flatter the work.

Two sites that link to each other. The term describes direction and nothing else.

It says nothing about why either link exists, which is the source of most confusion on this topic. Two relevant sites citing each other independently and two sites running a quota of swaps produce the same shape in a backlink tool.

A link from a page that curates useful references on a topic, such as a university department's reading list or an industry body's tools page.

Legitimate when the page is genuinely curated and read. The same format with no curation behind it is a link farm with better manners.

The link a partner owes you once you have published theirs.

The most commonly dropped item in a link building operation. Nobody forgets to publish the link they promised in the first email, and plenty of people forget the one due back three weeks later.

A domain that can supply placements, tracked with its metrics, contact, price if any, and past results.

The unit most teams organize a pipeline around, because the same domain gets considered again for a different client six months later and nobody remembers how the first attempt went.

A links to B, B links to C, and C links back to A, so the direct pair never appears.

It removes the easiest thing in the world to query against a link graph. It does not remove the arrangement, and the footprints that usually give schemes away are the other ones: repeated anchors, matching placement styles, and links going live in step.

A reference to your brand, product, or research on another site with no link attached.

Worth monitoring, because the ask is small and the answer is often yes. The writer already chose to mention you.

A message rejected by the receiving server, usually because the address does not exist.

A high bounce rate tells mailbox providers your list was not built carefully, and they respond by filtering everything else you send.

An unsolicited first message to someone you have no prior relationship with.

Most link outreach is cold email, which is why relevance, honesty about what you are asking for, and working opt-out handling are not optional extras.

The person behind a domain: name, role, email, and the history of what has been sent, agreed, and delivered.

Domains do not reply to emails, people do. Teams that track only domains lose the relationship the moment the person who built it leaves.

The rules governing unsolicited commercial email, including CAN-SPAM in the United States, GDPR and PECR in Europe, and CASL in Canada.

The common requirements are consistent: identify yourself honestly, do not disguise the subject, give a working way to opt out, and act on it. Global outreach means the strictest rule in your list applies to your process.

Whether your messages reach an inbox at all, as opposed to a spam folder or a silent block.

Domain reputation, sending volume, and authentication records decide it. No pitch survives failing it, and reply rate is the metric that quietly collapses when it does.

A tool that guesses or looks up a contact address for a domain.

Guessed addresses are the main source of bounces, which is the main source of sender reputation damage. Verify before sending rather than after.

Checking that an address exists and accepts mail before you send to it.

A second or later message to a contact who has not replied.

A large share of placements come from the first follow up. Almost none come from the fifth, and the fifth costs you the contact.

Building a new sending domain's reputation gradually before running real volume through it.

Keeping a prospect list free of duplicates, dead domains, and contacts already handled by someone else on the team.

The specific embarrassment this prevents is two people from the same agency pitching the same editor in the same week.

A placeholder in a template replaced per recipient, such as a first name or site name.

The visible failure mode is a message that arrives with the placeholder still in it. The invisible one is an email that is technically personalized and reads like a form.

Honoring a request to stop contact, recording it, and making sure no later campaign contacts that address again.

Required by law in most markets you are emailing into, and cheap to build in. Suppression has to live at the account level, not in one campaign, or the next list will undo it.

Contacting site owners, editors, or marketers to propose a link, a contribution, or a partnership.

The volume part of link building, and the part where a process beats talent. Same pitch, same list, different follow up discipline produces very different results.

A planned series of messages, usually an opening email and one or two follow ups, with rules for stopping when someone replies or asks you to.

The stop rules matter as much as the messages. A sequence that keeps sending after a reply is the fastest way to lose a relationship you just built.

A reusable message with variables for the parts that change per recipient.

A starting point, not a finished email. Templates keep the structure and the ask consistent; the specifics still have to be written by someone who looked at the site.

Writing to what a specific site actually publishes, rather than merging a first name into a template.

The test is whether the email would still make sense if you sent it to a different site. If it would, it is not personalized, it is merged.

The ask itself: what you want, what the recipient gets, and why it fits their site.

Most outreach emails fail on the middle part. If the only benefit described is one you receive, the message is a request for a favor from a stranger.

Live placements divided by contacts approached.

The number that survives contact with reality. A campaign can hold a healthy reply rate and still place almost nothing, which usually means the sites were never a fit.

A site or contact you have identified as worth approaching but have not worked with yet.

Ranking a prospect list before contacting it, so effort goes to the sites most likely to say yes and be worth a yes.

Finding and shortlisting sites worth contacting, before a single message is sent.

Where campaigns are won or lost. A great email to the wrong hundred sites loses to an average email to the right twenty.

Replies received divided by messages delivered, as a percentage.

The first honest read on whether a list and a pitch are working, and the one that moves first when either changes.

The domain your outreach mail is sent from, often a separate one from the main company site.

Separating it protects the primary domain's reputation if a campaign goes badly. It does not make aggressive sending safe, it just moves the damage.

The three DNS records that prove your mail really comes from your domain.

Missing or broken records send outreach straight to spam, and they are the first thing to check when reply rates fall off a cliff for no other reason.

The one line that decides whether the rest of the email is read.

Descriptive beats clever. Fake reply prefixes and invented previous conversations get opened once and remembered permanently.

The record of addresses and domains that must never be contacted again.

It has to live at the account level rather than inside one campaign, or the next list import will quietly undo every opt-out you have honored.

The HTML behind every link: an a tag with an href attribute pointing at a URL.

Anything that is not one of these is not a link, whatever it looks like on screen. Buttons wired up with JavaScript and text with a click handler pass nothing.

The link in the byline box underneath a contributed article.

The standard payment for a guest contribution, and worth less than a link inside the article itself, which is precisely why publications hand it out more freely.

Markup naming the preferred version of a page when several URLs hold similar content.

If your placement sits on a page canonicalized to a different URL, the signals follow the canonical. Worth checking on sites that syndicate or paginate heavily.

A search engine or tool fetching a page in order to read its contents and follow its links.

Link monitoring works by re-crawling every known placement on a schedule and comparing what came back against what was there last time.

A link in the site footer, appearing on every page.

The traditional home of designed-by credits and paid placements. Being on every page is exactly what makes it cheap to give and cheap in value.

A backlink pointing at a site's homepage rather than at an internal page.

Standard in partner, sponsor and directory listings. A profile weighted heavily toward homepage links usually came from relationships rather than from content anyone chose to cite.

The server's response for a URL: 200 for live, 301 or 302 for moved, 404 for not found, 410 for gone, and 5xx for a server error.

The first thing to check when a placement stops reporting. A 5xx often means the site was briefly down, not that your link was removed.

A link inside an embedded frame, which belongs to the framed document rather than the page you are looking at.

It will not show up in that page's HTML, and most checkers will call the placement missing.

A link that only appears in the page after JavaScript has run, rather than in the raw HTML.

Some crawlers and checking tools miss it, so a placement can be reported as lost while it is perfectly visible to a reader. Verify by hand before emailing a partner about it.

Showing search engines a different link, or a different page, than the one a person sees.

A named violation in Google's spam policies in its own right, separate from anything to do with links.

Where on the page a link sits: inside the body content, in a sidebar, or in the footer.

An in-content link inside a paragraph a person actually reads is worth more than a site-wide footer slot, and it is the first thing to look at when a partner offers a link that seems too easy.

A page level directive telling search engines not to follow any link on the page.

It applies to every outbound link at once, so a placement can be nofollowed without the link itself carrying an attribute. Checking the link markup alone misses it.

A link in a site's main menu.

On your own site it is the strongest internal signal you can send about a page. Coming from somebody else's site, it almost always means a formal relationship or a payment.

A directive telling search engines to keep a page out of their index.

A link on a noindexed page is invisible for ranking purposes. It is also one of the quieter ways a live placement stops being worth anything without the link itself changing at all.

A page nothing on its own site links to.

A hard won backlink pointing at an orphan page passes value into a dead end. Fixing that is an afternoon of internal linking, not another campaign.

A server instruction sending a request to a different URL. A 301 is permanent, a 302 is temporary.

Placements end up behind redirect chains after site migrations, and nobody is told. It is one of the more common reasons a link that still exists stops reporting as live.

An attribute on a link telling search engines not to pass ranking signals through it.

Google has treated it as a hint rather than a strict rule since 2019, meaning it may still be considered. A nofollowed link from a publication your buyers read is not worthless, it is just not a ranking play.

The attribute for links that were paid for or otherwise compensated.

Using it is what keeps a paid placement from being a policy violation. If money, product, or services changed hands for the link, this attribute is the difference between advertising and a link scheme.

The attribute marking links inside user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.

The file telling crawlers which parts of a site they may request.

A blocked page can still be indexed, but its content is never read, so any link on it goes unseen. It also blocks link checking tools, which produces false alarms.

A link in a page's side column, placed by the template rather than by the writer.

Usually sitewide without anyone calling it that, and worth a fraction of the same link inside a paragraph.

A link appearing on every page of a site, usually because it lives in a template header, sidebar, or footer.

It inflates raw link counts enormously while adding one referring domain. Designed-by and powered-by credits are the classic example.

A page that returns a 200 response while showing a not found message.

It defeats status code checks entirely: the monitor sees a healthy response and the reader sees nothing. Worth suspecting when a link vanishes from a page that still loads.

A link routed through an intermediate URL that records the click before forwarding the visitor.

Common on affiliate links and in some CMS templates. The destination gets the traffic and usually none of the ranking signal, so it is worth knowing which of your placements are wrapped this way.

The same indexing and following directives delivered in the HTTP response header rather than the HTML.

Invisible in a browser's page source, which makes it the most easily missed reason a placement is doing nothing.

Google's systems deciding not to count certain links, with no penalty applied to the site.

No notification, nothing in Search Console, and far more common than a manual action. Rankings simply do not move for links you thought you had.

A broad change to Google's ranking systems, announced by name and rolled out over weeks.

Not a penalty, and not aimed at links specifically. Sites often blame a link problem for a core update drop, which sends teams disavowing links that were never the issue.

A file uploaded to Google asking it to ignore specific links pointing at your site.

Google's own guidance is that most sites never need it. Realistically it is for links you or someone acting for you built, that cannot be removed, when there is a manual action or an obvious paid pattern in front of you.

Telling readers when content was paid for or when a link earns a commission, as advertising rules in most markets require.

A separate obligation from Google's policies, enforced by regulators such as the FTC rather than by a search engine. A sponsored post needs both the disclosure and the rel attribute.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the framework in Google's quality rater guidelines for judging content.

Not a ranking factor with a score behind it. It matters here because it describes what a site worth being linked from looks like, which is a better qualification rubric than any metric.

The phrase Google's spam policies use for the repeated link to me and I will link to you arrangement.

It describes scale and purpose rather than direction. Google has never published a threshold, so any specific percentage you have read was invented by whoever wrote it.

Buying a lapsed domain and repurposing its accumulated authority for unrelated content. Named in Google's spam policies.

A repeated pattern that makes an arrangement detectable: identical anchors, matching placement styles, links going live in step, shared hosting, or shared templates.

Schemes are rarely caught one link at a time. They are caught because a hundred links share something no hundred independent editorial decisions would.

Google's free reporting tool for how a site performs in search, including the links report and the manual actions report.

The only place a manual action ever appears. If nothing is there, whatever went wrong was not a penalty.

Google's documentation of what it expects from sites, including the spam policies. It replaced the Webmaster Guidelines in 2022.

The primary source for every policy term on this page. Worth reading directly rather than through anyone's summary, this one included.

A site or network whose pages exist to hold outbound links, with no audience of its own.

The tell is the ratio: pages full of links, no traffic, and no reason for a reader to be there.

Google's term for link arrangements intended to manipulate rankings.

Its spam policies name buying and selling links that pass ranking signals, excessive link exchanges, large scale article campaigns with keyword-rich links, and automated link creation.

The broader category in Google's spam policies that link schemes sit inside.

Worth reading in the original rather than in someone's summary of it, including this one. The policy is short and the wording carries the whole argument.

A named Google update specifically targeting unnatural links, using SpamBrain to identify both the sites buying links and the sites selling them.

The important detail for anyone trading placements: the selling side is named too, so hosting other people's paid links carries its own risk.

A penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google after judging a site to be in breach of its spam policies.

It appears in Search Console, which is what separates it from a devaluation, and it needs a reconsideration request once the underlying problem is fixed.

Pointing deliberately bad links at a competitor in the hope of harming their rankings.

Google has said its systems ignore this sort of thing, and in practice most suspected cases turn out to be a core update or a technical problem. Check the boring explanations first.

A link exchanged for money, goods, or services.

Permitted when it is qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". A violation when it passes ranking signals. The attribute is the entire difference.

The Google algorithm update, first released in 2012, that targeted link schemes and unnatural link profiles.

Since 2016 it has run as part of the core algorithm in real time, and it devalues links rather than demoting whole sites. Its legacy is that spammy links mostly stop counting instead of triggering a penalty.

A set of sites, often built on expired domains, whose reason to exist is to link to a target site.

Google's spam policies never use the term, and cover the arrangement through the bullets it trips instead. The shared hosting, templates, and registration patterns that make a network cheap to run are the same ones that make it detectable.

The submission asking Google to review a manual action after the underlying issue has been cleaned up.

It is read by a person, so it needs evidence of what was found, what was changed, and what stopped it happening again.

Producing pages at volume, by any method, mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help anyone. Named in Google's spam policies.

The policy is about purpose and scale rather than about how the text was written, which is the part most summaries of it get wrong.

Publishing third party content on a strong domain mainly to exploit that domain's ranking signals. Named in Google's spam policies.

This is what the coupon and casino sections bolted onto news sites are. If a placement is offered on a subfolder of a major publication for a suspiciously low price, this is usually what is being sold.

Google's machine learning based spam detection system.

Google has said it is used to neutralize unnatural links rather than only to penalize the sites involved, which is the mechanism behind most quiet devaluations.

The specific manual action applied for links Google judges to be manipulative, either to a site's outgoing links or its incoming ones.

It comes in partial and sitewide forms. Partial affects specific pages or links, sitewide affects the whole domain, and both appear in Search Console with the type named.

A deliberate spread of anchor text across a campaign's placements, decided in advance rather than per email.

Its real job is preventing the pattern nobody sets out to build: the same commercial phrase requested from every partner because each request was written separately.

Connecting link data to the other systems a team runs on: backlink tools, reporting dashboards, or a client's own stack.

A required review before a domain is approached or a placement is agreed.

The cheapest control there is. One person checking a list against the qualification rubric prevents most of what a link audit later has to unpick.

The record of who agreed what, when, and on whose instruction.

It matters at exactly one moment: when a client, an auditor, or a new head of SEO asks why a particular link exists. Nobody builds it in time unless the tool does it for them.

A defined push with a target, a date range, and a set of domains attached to it.

The unit most reporting is grouped by, and the reason placements need a campaign field from the start rather than after the first client review.

Working on two clients who compete for the same keywords, and the placement decisions that follow.

Agencies hit this constantly and rarely have a rule written down. Decide who gets a shared domain before the situation arrives rather than after.

Total campaign cost divided by placements won, including time as well as any money paid.

The number that makes trades, contributions, and paid placements comparable. Leaving labor out of it is how exchanges end up looking free.

Bringing a list of domains or contacts in from a spreadsheet in one go.

Usually the first step when a team moves off sheets, and the point at which duplicate domains across clients become visible for the first time.

Getting your placements, contacts, and history out of a tool in a format you own.

Worth checking before you commit a portfolio to any system, including this one. A link inventory you cannot export is a link inventory you are renting.

Catching a domain that is already in the system under another client, campaign, or team member.

Two people from the same agency pitching one editor in a week is the visible cost. Linking two competing clients from the same site is the expensive one.

What a campaign can spend, in money and hours, on acquiring placements.

A system for managing partners, contacts, deals, and placements in one place, rather than a spreadsheet per client.

The switch usually happens when someone cannot answer which partners owe us a link without opening four files.

The client or stakeholder facing summary: what was placed, where, with what anchor, and what is still live today.

That last column is the one that builds trust, because it is the one a client can check themselves.

Return measured against what links produced: rankings, traffic, and revenue, rather than placement counts.

Placement counts are an activity metric. They are worth reporting, and they are not the same thing as a result.

The full list of placements you own across every client, with status and history.

This is the thing a spreadsheet stops handling somewhere past a few hundred rows, usually at the point where two people are editing it in the same week.

The stages a domain moves through: prospect, contacted, agreed, published, verified.

Stages are what let you see where a campaign is stuck. Volume at the top with nothing reaching verified is a qualification problem, not an outreach one.

A recurring fee for an agreed volume of work or placements per month.

Retainers priced per link push agencies toward whatever is cheapest to acquire, which is usually the riskiest thing on the menu. Worth knowing whichever side of the invoice you are on.

The page a campaign is trying to move: the one links point at, directly or through internal linking.

Pointing everything at a commercial page is the fastest way to build a profile that looks arranged. Most campaigns aim at an asset and route the value internally.

How long a placement takes from agreement to live, which for partner sites is usually measured in weeks.

The gap is where return links get forgotten. It is also why a monthly report is a poor unit for judging a campaign started three weeks ago.

A report branded for the agency and its client rather than for the tool that produced it.