The number in your report is smaller than it looks
Domain Rating 62. Fourteen hundred backlinks. Two hundred and six referring domains. Every one of those is a real output from a real tool, and every one of them means something narrower than the person reading your slide will assume.
This site is about that gap. Not how to get links — how to read the data about them.
What you’ll find here
- What the metrics are computed from. DR, DA, UR and their relatives are closed formulas on top of a proprietary crawl. There’s still a lot that’s knowable about how they behave, starting with the fact that most of them are logarithmic and almost nobody reads them that way.
- Why two tools disagree by 4×. Not because one is lying. Because you’re comparing the sizes of two different crawls, deduplicated by two different rules, with two different opinions about when a dead link stops counting.
- Referring domains versus total backlinks. One of these numbers is mostly noise and it’s usually the bigger one.
- Whether that link actually did anything. The hardest question in link measurement, and the one you’ll be asked. There’s an honest answer, and it involves admitting what you can’t isolate.
- The metrics that mislead. Link velocity, anchor ratios, “toxicity” scores — where each one came from and what it’s worth.
The consistent position: describe how a number is produced before you interpret it. Most bad link analysis isn’t a bad tool, it’s a good tool read as though it measured something it doesn’t.
We don’t publish statistics we can’t source, including about links. A site arguing for metric honesty that invents its own correlation figures would be a fairly short argument.
Latest posts
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What Domain Rating Actually Measures
DR is a logarithmic score derived from one vendor's crawl of the link graph. Here's what that means for the number in your report.
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Why Two Tools Report Different Backlink Counts
One tool says 1,400 links, another says 5,900, Search Console says something else again. Neither is broken — here's the mechanism.
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Referring Domains Versus Total Backlinks
One of these numbers is stable and informative; the other is dominated by footers and templates. Which to report, and why.
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How to Tell Whether a Link Did Anything
You can't isolate one link in a live search index. Here's what you can honestly claim, and how to build a case that survives scrutiny.
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Link Velocity and Other Metrics That Mislead
Velocity, anchor ratios, toxicity scores, link-to-page ratios. Where each came from, what it's derived from, and how much weight it holds.