An inbound link is a hyperlink on another page or domain that points at the page or site you are measuring — a reference from somewhere else on the web, pointing in.
| Term | Inbound Link |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | Incoming Link |
| Where it appears | Off-page analysis |
What it means in RankGear
Inbound links surface in RankGear’s off-page analysis, where an enabled data provider enriches a run with the external references pointing at each measured URL or domain. Alongside referring domains, entities, and authority metrics, the inbound-link count answers a simple question: how many links elsewhere on the web point in at this page? It is a raw tally of incoming references, gathered from the provider’s own crawl of the link graph rather than from anything RankGear discovers on the page itself.
How to interpret it
Read the inbound-link count as a volume signal, and always separate provider availability from the value: if no off-page provider is enabled for the run, the field is simply empty, not zero. When you do have numbers, compare them only across pages measured under the same run conditions and the same provider, because indexes and scales differ. Volume on its own is not authority — a page can carry thousands of inbound links that all originate from a handful of sites, so read the count next to the referring-domain figure to see whether the links are concentrated or genuinely spread across the web.
| Inbound links | Total number of individual links pointing in — raw volume, easily inflated by many links from one source. |
|---|---|
| Referring domains | How many distinct sites those links come from — the better read on breadth of reference. |
Example
You run off-page analysis on a product page and its closest competitor. The provider reports 1,240 inbound links from 85 referring domains for your page, and 210 inbound links from 140 referring domains for the competitor. Your raw count is nearly six times higher, but the competitor’s references are spread across far more distinct sites — a difference the total alone would have hidden. That contrast is the useful part of the comparison, not the bigger number by itself.
Important considerations
- Provider metrics use different link indexes and scales; they are comparative indicators, not Google scores, and should only be compared within the same provider and run.
- A high inbound-link count does not make a page rank — these are correlational signals of reference, not a causal ranking input.
- Distinguish inbound links (raw volume) from referring domains (breadth); the two can point in opposite directions.
- The field depends on an enabled off-page provider — with none configured, no inbound-link data is collected for the run.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.