A backlink is a link from another website that points to the domain or page RankGear is measuring — one page on the web citing another.
| Term | Backlink |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | Incoming Backlink |
| Where it appears | Backlinks and domain metrics |
What it means in RankGear
RankGear does not crawl the web for links itself. Backlink counts reach the workbook through a connected link-and-authority provider: once that provider returns data for a run, each measured URL gets an off-page column showing how many incoming links the provider found pointing at it. Those figures sit in the backlinks and domain-metrics area alongside referring domains and the vendor’s authority score, next to RankGear’s own on-page measurements, so an off-page picture can be read against the on-page one for the same set of pages.
How to interpret it
Read a backlink count as comparative evidence, not a verdict. First keep provider availability separate from the value: if no provider is connected or it returns nothing, the column is empty — that is missing data, not a page with zero links. Second, compare counts only among pages pulled in the same run and from the same provider, because each vendor indexes the web differently. A raw total also says little on its own: one hundred links from a single site is a different signal than one hundred links from one hundred distinct referring domains, which is why the two figures are reported side by side.
| Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Backlinks | Total incoming links the provider found pointing at the URL, including several from the same site. |
| Referring domains | The number of distinct sites those backlinks come from — usually the more telling of the two. |
Example
You are comparing your service page against eight pages that rank for “industrial epoxy flooring.” With a link provider connected, the run’s domain-metrics columns fill in: the top two results show a few thousand backlinks from several hundred referring domains each, while your page shows a few dozen backlinks from a dozen domains. That gap does not by itself explain the rankings, but it flags off-page authority as a dimension where the leaders are far ahead — something the on-page columns alone would not have surfaced.
Important considerations
- Backlink figures come from an external provider’s index. Different vendors use different indexes and scales, so their numbers are not interchangeable — only compare within one provider and one run.
- They are comparative indicators, not Google scores. A larger backlink count is correlated with stronger pages in a competitive set; it does not measure ranking and does not, on its own, make a page rank.
- An unset, expired, or rate-limited provider leaves the backlink columns blank rather than reporting zero — treat empty as “not measured,” not “no links.”
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.