I don't mind the hijacking
Links buried deep into sites (especially big sites that are poorly optimized) sometimes don't get to see the googlebot crawl them because of the crawl budget and the poor optimization, and if they don't get crawled they don't get indexed, and non-indexed backlinks are not very valuable.
Maybe I've been too radical in my explanations (I oftentimes am), but there is some truth to this
RDs = Referring Domains, which basically means how many unique domains link to you.
Many centuries ago when google have been in their incipient phases they used to value backlinks above everything else when ranking pages. That is, if you got 1 million of backlinks from 1 domain only (let's say from blogger.com), then those 1 million backlinks - all things being equal - would rank you above everyone else that didn't have 1 million backlinks regardless of whether or not those people's backlinks came from 1 domain, or from 100 domains. And - as usual - this had opened up the floodgates of spam and abuse because people would just get 100s of backlinks from the same site (an easily accessible and free one, too) and would rank and bank. And this bothers google, of course...
So then google have thought to themselves "you know, getting 1 million of backlinks from a few sites (free and easy ones, too) is not cool because everyone and their grandma can get backlinks and this manipulates our algos. Let's take this one step further and rate the number and quality of the RDs over the backlinks from now on". And done they have...
So now, the number and quality of the RDs weight more than the number of backlinks because everyone can get 1000s backlinks from free sites (web 2.0s, bookmarks, article / wiki directories, profiles, etc), but not everyone can get links from quality sites because those links cost money and many SEOs can't afford them.
There might be extra reasoning behind google's decision to lower the value of backlinks coming from free sites, I don't know. But I do know that getting 100 links from 100 different domains (or RDs, it's really the same thing) offers more link juice than having 1000s backlink from a few RDs.... Of course, there is also the possibility of those "few RDs" to be insanely powerful and trustworthy, in which case getting several backlinks from these "few RDs" is way better than 1 million of low quality backlinks coming from 100s of web 2.0 sites, for example.
You always need to factor both the amount, and the quality of the backlinks when planning your link building campaigns
DA / PA = Domain Authority / Page Authority. These are metrics invented by MOZ to help us assess the authority (implicitly the quality) of the websites. DA / PA have been invented by MOZ after Google have stopped making the PR (Page Rank) metric public several years ago.
Up until... I don't know... 2015 or so maybe Google have allowed us to see the PR of each page (PR is a score from 1 to 10 that Google assigns to each page individually, and based on this score the pages would rank high or low in the SERPs)... so anyway, after Google have stopped displaying the PR of pages (because we took advantage of this info and learned how to increase the PR of the pages and this allowed us to manipulate the rankings and google obviously didn't like it so they stopped displaying the PR) then MOZ have come up with the DA and PA metrics to replace Google's PR.
But Google doesn't care one bit about MOZ's DA and PA metrics, or about Ahrefs' DR and UR metrics (by the way, both MOZ and Ahrefs' metrics are calculated more or less in the same way), which is why you see pages with very low DA or PA outranking pages with insanely high DA (80+ even).
Nowadays, knowledgeable SEOs treat DA / DR just as a guideline (because these metrics do reflect a site's authority to some extent, so they're worth checking just to get a rough idea of what you're up against when you assess your competition's toughness, but they're not a dead giveaway of the reasons for which a page ranks high or low in google), but - like I said - these metrics are not directly responsible for a page / site's rankings, so don't rely on them too much...
Here is how MOZ and Ahrefs calculate their DA / PA and DR / UR metrics:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authorityhttps://ahrefs.com/blog/domain-rating/
d0follow = links that don't have this tag appended to them...
rel="nofollow"
Just right click on any link that you see and choose "inspect" (or "inspect element", depending on which browser you use the terminology could be different, but they refer to the same thing) and look at the code of that link and if you see
rel="nofollow" anywhere before / after the link (within a 10-20 words long string usually) then this means that the link is NOT d0follow (it's nofollow, duh!), which means that THAT particular link carries very little SEO value (or link juice, or link equity, or authority, etc... whatever you want to call it, it's the same thing basically)
Some people say that nofollow links still provide SEO value (link juice), but I've never seen or tested this, so I don't know whether this is true or false...
All I know - and this is important - is that, even though nofollow links are not valuable for SEO, having only d0follow backlinks in your backlinking profile is a BAD MISTAKE. Google knows that backlinks make you rank, and they know that d0follow backlinks are the ones doing the magic (after all, google themselves have implemented these rules, so they rely on them to rank sites), and they want to prevent people from gaming their system at all costs, and having 100% d0follow links in your backlinks profile is dead giveaway that you are a SEO (a link builder) and google will de-index your site as soon as they catch you doing any link building at all.
That's why it's better to have both d0follow links and n0follow ones whenever you build links to any page or site that you own, although - of course - you will want most of your backlinks to be d0follow since these backlinks provide the biggest benefit for your site. I think anywhere between 60-65% and 80-85% is a safe ratio to have of d0follow vs nofollow links for any backlinking profile...
in-content... well, this is pretty self-explanatory
But in case you didn't figure out yet, let's say that I insert one link into all of this long-ass message that I've posted. Any backlink that I surround by this wall of text is considered "in content" (because it actually IS within content lol). In content links provide more SEO value than links that are in footer, or in the sidebar, or image links, etc... This is one of the reason for which guest posts and niche edit links are so good (they are literally inserted into the actual article, and google values these links more than most other links, with some exceptions, such as PBN links, .edu/gov links, etc)
OBLs = Outbound Links (at least that's what I call them, I've heard some people calling them differently, but they're the same thing).
OBLs simply means links that don't point to your site. Let's say you have a website about pets, and you want to post one article that talks about dog training, and in that article you have 2 links: the 1st one links out to a wikipedia page about dog breeds, and the 2nd link in your article links out to another page of your site that talks about dog training services.
In this case, the 1st link in your article (the one that links out to wikipedia) is considered an OBL because it simply takes people away from your site and all links that take people to other sites than the ones they're on are considered OBLs.
And the reason for which OBLs matter is because when a page has authority (PA) that authority either stays on the page and helps it rank higher in google if no links are present on the page, or - if links are present on the page - then that page's authority is split up between all of the links on the page. I don't know the exact percentages of link juice (authority) that each link gets, so don't ask because my knowledge is limited in this regard
But I know that each link on a page gets a certain amount of the page's authority (if it has any, otherwise there's no authority to be split up, of course), with the 1st link on the page getting the biggest chunk of it. Whether this is true or not I can't say, it's just what I've heard a few years ago and it stuck with me....
So, if you're going to have OBLs on your page (which - again - from a SEO perspective is important and you should have OBLs in your articles for reasons that I won't explain right now because I'm already getting into a lot of details and it's taking too much time) it's usually a good practice to add
rel="nofollow" tags to those links so they don't receive too much link juice, thus lowering the authority of your page considerably which, eventually, will lead to that page not to rank as high in google as you want it to.
the site's owner / editor decision to add
rel="nofollow" to that link. It's a totally subjective decision and if the people you want to buy backlinks from decide to make your backlinks nofollow there's nothing you can do about it, you can choose to whine, or not buy links from them. But it's still their decision ultimately
I don't use any tools because I've quit doing SEO last year as I need to finish something (offline) before 2025 so my entire focus is on this project.
But yeah, Ahrefs and Semrush are very good, but Ahrefs is insanely expensive so I don't recommend it anymore. But Semrush is the next best thing...
If you don't like / can't afford these 2, other options that I can think of off the top of my head are KeywordTitan, Keysearch, SE Ranking, SEO Power Suite, Jaaxy.... but these are not as powerful as Ahrefs / Semrush from what I remember, but hey, if you can't afford the top tools the other ones can still provide you with the much needed data to plan your SEO. But you'll have to rely on your SEO experience and judgement more
they're making SEO tools useless with regards to THIS particular aspect (checking the backlinks of a website), but the SEO tools (especially the big ones) have many other functionalities, so they're not totally useless yet.
I don't know how to hide the backlinks, though as I'm not very tech-savvy. But if I were to guess I would say that they are blocking the crawlers of these tools at htaccess / robots.txt level... probably...
oh, you have no idea! And if you don't have the motivation AND resources (because you'll need lots of both) I recommend you never think about doing it. Better buy links from someone else and use the free time to enjoy life
it means that you contact the owner of another site and tell him "hey, dude! I like your site and I want a backlink from your site because your site is cool and google likes it, so if you give me backlink I give you content and money. And the other guy says: wow, dude! I like you too, so let's have a deal! You give me a nice piece of content that caters to my audience and you also Paypal me $100 and I promise to let you link to the site you want from within this article that you give me and which I will publish on my site"
Of course, the negotiations between you and the guy whose site you want to get a backlink from will run professionally and not like I typed them. But you get the idea
Basically, a guest post is a piece of content that you publish on other people's websites in exchange for a backlink from their website. It's a win-win deal for both of you: the other guy gets quality content (if you do provide him with quality content - which you should because it's in the interest of both of you for the content to be gobbled up by readers - otherwise you'll come across as a scumbag and the other guy might not even accept your content) and - upon agreement - a chunk of money too, and you get a backlink from a quality site that google likes and trusts (IF the site does rank in google, of course, otherwise it might not be worth getting a backlink from it to begin with)...
Or, if you are the seller of guest posts the roles are switched: you get quality content and money while the buyer gets backlinks from you. It's the same principle, just the roles are reversed...
Good!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I go outside to touch the grass because I've been typing this message for nearly 45 minutes (not joking), and my brain is almost fried trying to translate this content from my language into English
If you have more questions that I know the answers to feel free to ask them, but you'll probably have to wait for hours before I reply because I'm depleted and need a break..
