A cooking website publishes recipes for homemade pizza, chocolate cake, and easy pasta dishes. Over time, other websites begin sharing links to those recipes.
One food blog links to both the pizza and pasta recipes, while another website recommends the chocolate cake recipe to its readers.
Each of those links is called a backlink because it leads from another website to the cooking website.
But looking at all three links together tells us more than looking at each one separately. We can see which websites are linking to the recipes, how many links they provide, and which pages receive them.
In SEO, this overall collection of incoming links is called a backlink profile.
There’s another useful distinction here. Although the cooking website has received three backlinks, they come from only two different websites. Those websites are called referring domains.
The first food blog provides two backlinks, but it still counts as one referring domain. The second website provides another backlink and represents a second referring domain.
This is why understanding a backlink profile involves looking beyond the total number of links to see where they come from and how they are distributed.
What Information Does a Backlink Profile Include?
A backlink profile contains several details that help describe the links pointing to a website.
One is the destination of each link. The cooking website might receive some backlinks to its homepage, while others lead directly to individual recipes.
This distinction matters because a website’s total backlink count doesn’t reveal which of its pages other publishers are referencing.
The source matters too. A link might appear in the middle of an article, on a page collecting useful resources, or in another section of a website.
You can also look at the clickable words used in those links. These words are called anchor text. They might contain a recipe’s name, the cooking website’s name, or a short description of the linked content.
Together, these details describe where links originate, where they lead, and how they’re presented to readers.
How Can One Referring Domain Provide Multiple Backlinks?
A website can publish hundreds of individual pages, and several of them may link to the same external website.
For example, a food blog might mention your pasta recipe in an article about quick dinners and link to it again in a collection of Italian recipes.
A link could also appear in a shared section of the website, such as a footer, causing it to appear across multiple pages.
These situations can increase the number of recorded backlinks without adding another referring domain.
The way a report groups domains and duplicate links can vary between tools. Google Search Console, for example, groups subdomains under the website’s main domain name and combines certain duplicate links.
Backlinks vs. Referring Domains: A Simple Comparison
The cooking website example helps show what these different measurements tell you.
| What You’re Looking At | What It Measures | Example From Our Cooking Website |
|---|---|---|
| Total Backlinks | The number of links pointing to your website from other websites. | Three backlinks pointing to the pizza, pasta, and chocolate cake recipes. |
| Referring Domains | The number of distinct domains providing those links. | Two websites provide the three backlinks. |
| Linked Pages | Which pages on your website receive the backlinks. | The pizza, pasta, and chocolate cake recipe pages each receive a link. |
These measurements describe different parts of the same backlink profile. Together, they help you see how many links have been recorded, where they come from, and which pages receive them.
Do More Referring Domains Mean a Better Backlink Profile?
Not necessarily.
Referring domains tell you how many different sources have linked to a website. They don’t tell you why those links were added or whether the sources are relevant to the content receiving them.
A website with links from many different domains has a broader range of recorded sources than one receiving links from only a handful of domains.
But the number itself isn’t a quality rating.
Similarly, a website can accumulate hundreds of backlinks because another website repeatedly links to it across many pages. That doesn’t mean hundreds of independent publishers have chosen to reference its content.
Backlink totals and referring-domain counts describe different characteristics. Neither can establish the value of a link on its own.
What Makes a Backlink Profile Natural?
Beyond counting the links, you can ask why publishers included them. A natural backlink profile generally describes links that arise from genuine references and recommendations, rather than arrangements made primarily to manipulate search rankings.
For our cooking website, a food blogger might recommend its pizza recipe, while a local newspaper might link to the website when reporting on a cooking event involving its owner. The websites cover different subjects, but both references have an understandable purpose.
Several writers could also independently use the pizza recipe’s title as anchor text. Their wording doesn’t have to be different for their recommendations to be genuine.
Google’s link spam policy focuses on manipulative practices, such as buying links for ranking purposes, rather than prescribing a perfect mixture of sources or anchors. Making a purchased ranking-link campaign look more varied doesn’t change how those links were obtained. The useful distinction is between genuine reasons for linking and arrangements intended to manipulate rankings.
Can a Backlink Profile Change Over Time?
A backlink profile keeps changing. Another website might add a link to one of your recipes, change the destination of an existing link, or remove a reference altogether. Sometimes an entire page containing a backlink disappears.
The rate at which a website gains backlinks is commonly called link velocity.
If the same report records 10 new backlinks one month and 30 the next, it shows faster recorded growth. Keep the comparison consistent: new backlinks and new referring domains measure different things, and the periods being compared should be similar. Some existing links may also disappear during that period, so newly discovered links don’t necessarily represent the net increase in your total.
That growth doesn’t have to follow a steady schedule. A recipe might attract attention from several publications and then receive few new mentions the following month. Google’s published link spam policy doesn’t set a safe monthly quota or require a smooth growth curve. A sudden increase alone doesn’t establish manipulation, and manufacturing links just to keep the graph rising steadily misses the point.
Instead, use the change as a starting point for investigation. Which websites account for the increase? Which recipes received the links? Did a particular mention introduce your website to more writers? The growth rate helps you notice changes, but it cannot answer those questions on its own.
Also distinguish between a link being published and a tool discovering it. A “first seen” date can record when the tool found the backlink, not when the publisher added it. Similarly, a removed link may remain in a report until the source page is checked again. The graph therefore reflects the tool’s observations, not a complete real-time history of your backlinks.
Can You See Your Entire Backlink Profile in One Report?
Tools can help you explore a backlink profile, but their reports have limitations.
Google Search Console, for example, provides a Links report showing some of the websites linking to yours, the pages receiving those links, and the words used in them.
Google explains that this report contains a sample rather than a complete list of every backlink.
Other SEO tools maintain their own databases of discovered links. Because they explore and update different parts of the web, their reported totals may not match.
The important distinction is between the backlinks that actually exist and the portion a particular tool has recorded.
