A glossary for writers who sign their pages
Two vocabularies collide when you write by hand and care about links: the one about authorship and the one about link data. Both are defined here, in the order you are likely to meet them.
NoAISEO research team ·
Authorship and quality terms
Use these when a client, an editor or a detector vendor starts throwing words at you.
E-E-A-T
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust. A framework in Google's quality rater guidelines, with the first E added in December 2022. Not a score you can read off a dashboard.
Byline
The named author on a page. Worth most when it links to a bio showing real work and a way to make contact.
Version history
The saved sequence of edits in Google Docs, Word or Git. The cheapest form of authorship evidence and the hardest to fabricate neatly.
Provenance
Where a piece of content came from and what happened to it. Standards such as C2PA Content Credentials attach this to images, though few text tools support them yet.
First-hand detail
A fact, photo or measurement only the author could have. It is what the word Experience points at.
AI detector
Software that estimates whether text is machine-made. Its output is a probability with known error, not a verdict. See the troubleshooting table.
Scaled content abuse
Google's spam policy since March 2024 for producing many pages mainly to rank, by any method. It describes behaviour, not authorship.
Disclosure line
One sentence naming the tools that touched the text, from spellcheck to translation. Narrow and true beats broad and untestable.
Helpful content
Google's label for pages made for people first. A system update in August 2022 and a refresh in September 2023 aimed at the opposite.
Link terms
These show up in every report, from Ahrefs to Majestic, and in ours.
Backlink
A link on another site that points to yours. The raw count can be inflated by a single sitewide footer.
Referring domain
A distinct site that links to you. Ten links from one domain count as one referring domain, which makes it the steadier number.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. Our anchors action returns the wording others used about a site.
Domain Rating (DR)
A 0–100 score. Ours is round(100 · log(ref_domains+1) / log(2·10^7)), a log scale on our own link index. Comparable in spirit to Ahrefs DR or Moz DA and never the same figure.
Nofollow
A link attribute asking search engines not to treat the link as an endorsement. Still sends readers, which is often the real value.
Backlinks tracker
Any tool or spreadsheet that records new and lost links over time. With our index, refreshed roughly monthly, a monthly snapshot is the honest cadence. Do not read daily movement into it.
Top pages
The URLs on a site that attract the most links. Useful for seeing whether one article carries your whole profile.
Intersect
Our action that shows which sites link to two to ten domains at once. Handy for finding the publications that cover your whole field, at 2 credits per call.
Link graph
The map of who links to whom. Ours holds 181,132,097 domains and 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links, plus about 798.5 billion backlinks.
Disavow
A file you can submit to Google asking it to ignore certain links. Rarely needed, and no substitute for fixing what you control.
Definitions are stable; the weight Google gives each thing is not public. When someone sells you a tidy formula for E-E-A-T or link value, ask for the experiment behind it.