Glossary
Tier 3 backlinks and friends: a glossary for gardeners
Link talk is full of words that sound like they were invented to confuse newcomers. These are the ones we get asked about most, explained like plant labels.
Skim the headings, stop where a word looks strange, and see the first order walkthrough for the terms in action. Each entry ends with what it means for a small green blog. Our shop sells single placements, so some terms here are explained so you can recognise them elsewhere.
The terms, from tiers to anchors
Arranged roughly by how often people ask.
Tier 1 backlinks
Links that point straight at your own page. A placement on a relevant blog that links to your guide is tier 1. Most of what our shop sells fits here, and a comparison of routes is in our tier 1 guide.
Tier 2 backlinks
Links that point at the page carrying your tier 1 link, not at you. People use them to strengthen an existing placement. They add complexity and cost, and for a small blog we rarely see the point.
Tier 3 backlinks
Links pointing at the tier 2 pages. Each step away from your site makes the chain thinner, harder to judge and easier to get wrong. For a garden blog with a modest budget, we would put money into better tier 1 placements instead.
Dofollow
A normal link that does not carry a rel attribute asking search engines to ignore it. Our placements are permanent and dofollow. Dofollow is not a promise of effect, only a statement that the link is allowed to count.
Nofollow
A link marked so that search engines treat it as a hint rather than an endorsement. Social posts and many forum links are like this. They can still send readers.
Web2.0
Free blog platforms such as hosted blogging sites, where anyone can open a page. Links from them are easy to make and easy to discount. Our shop sells placements on vetted, traffic-checked sites instead.
Pagerank
Google's original link-scoring idea, public until the toolbar score was retired. Today people use the phrase loosely. In our rows you will see Domain Rating, a different measure, so read pagerank offers with care.
Domain Rating (DR)
A 0 to 100 score from Ahrefs for the strength of a site's link profile. Higher is not always better for you: a very high DR site that never covers gardening may suit you less than a smaller, close one.
Referring domains
The number of separate sites linking to a site, not the number of links. A site with 40 referring domains and a site with 40 links from one domain are very different gardens.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. Natural anchors mix your brand, the page's topic and plain phrases such as 'this guide'. A hundred identical keyword anchors read like a shouting match.
Backlinks robot
A loose term for software that creates links automatically in bulk. We do not run one. Every placement in our shop is a single order on a single site, and you can see it in your account.
A word on chains and pyramids
Pyramids of links are old folklore. Google's Penguin update, which went real time in September 2016, was built to discount exactly this sort of pattern.
It is tempting to think that more layers mean more power. In practice each layer adds a chance of a bad neighbour, and you rarely get to see what the lower layers look like.
We would rather you spent the same money on three clean placements, chosen with the red-flag list beside you. Slow, plain, readable.