Glossary
Twelve terms from the world of link data and publishing pipelines, each with the field name you will read in JSON and the mistake people make with it.
SEOBlogBot research team ·
Terms, not theory.
People search for an seo moz backlink checker because they have seen Domain Authority in a report and want the same number in a script. Our rating is a different metric, so the entries below say what each term means here and where it differs from the big tools.
Skip to the entry you need; each one stands alone.
A distinct site that links to yours, counted once however many links it sends. The action refdomains lists them, 2 credits per call.
One link from one page to another. Our index holds about 798.5 billion of them, and the backlinks action returns up to 1,000 rows per call.
The clickable words of a link. anchors returns the distribution, and an unnatural pile of one phrase is the thing to watch.
round(100 x log(ref_domains + 1) / log(20,000,000)). A log scale, so 20 to 30 is a bigger jump than 60 to 70.
Other tools' metrics with their own formulas. They will not equal our number, so never mix them in one threshold.
The map of who links to whom. Ours has 181,132,097 domains and 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links.
People mix up counts.
A site with 10,000 backlinks from 40 referring domains is far smaller, in link-graph terms, than one with 2,000 backlinks from 900 referring domains. Our rating is built on referring domains for that reason, and a gate that reads raw backlink totals is easy to fool with one sitewide footer link.
Another trap is the word "free". overview is free, but refdomains costs 2 credits, and the first reply with _credits is where you learn which kind of call you made.
Look at ok first.
Every response carries it, and authenticated ones add _credits with the cost and the remaining balance. Parse those two before anything else, because a pipeline that reads data from a reply with ok false will happily write garbage into your log.
A check that can stop a post before it ships. See the decision tree.
A check that runs after publishing and reports instead of blocking. The runbook has a schedule.
A job you can repeat without changing the outcome. Read-only API calls are idempotent; your Slack alerts usually are not, so deduplicate them.
The billing unit. One credit equals $0.0001, and the response field _credits shows cost and balance.
401 means a missing or bad key; 402 means the credit ran out. Retrying fixes neither.
Our data updates roughly once a month. A fresh link may not appear for weeks, so alerts should compare months.
Teams set a DR floor from a screenshot of another tool, such as Moz DA or Ahrefs DR, then wonder why half the good posts are held. Calibrate on your own posts first.
Names do not drift.
We keep field names such as ok, _credits, per and page unchanged between releases of this guide, and when the product facts change we update the glossary the same day. If a term here disagrees with what your own reply shows, trust the reply and tell us on the account page.