You open your backlink report and notice that three different articles from the same gardening website link to your site. At first, it might look as though three different sources have mentioned you, but all three links actually came from the same website.
You have three backlinks, but only one referring domain.
That difference becomes much easier to understand once you separate the link from the website that created it. A backlink is an individual link pointing to your website, while a referring domain is the website that sent one or more of those links.
So if the gardening website links to you again tomorrow, your backlink count can increase while your referring domain count stays exactly the same.
How Can One Referring Domain Give You Many Backlinks?
A domain is the main website address, such as example.com, and that website can contain hundreds or thousands of individual pages. More than one of those pages can link to your site.
A gardening website, for example, might link to your tomato guide from one article and to your soil guide from another. Three other articles on the same website might also contain links to your pages.
You would then have:
5 backlinks
1 referring domain
All five links came from the same website, so they share the same referring domain.
A referring domain is therefore not another type of backlink. It tells you which website your backlinks came from. If backlinks themselves are still unfamiliar, understanding what a backlink is first makes this distinction much easier.
What Happens When Different Websites Link to You?
The numbers change when the links come from different websites.
If five separate websites each link to your site once, you still have five backlinks, but now you also have five referring domains:
5 backlinks
5 referring domains
This is why backlink and referring domain totals can look very different in an SEO report.
One website might have 1,000 backlinks from 50 referring domains because some of those websites link to it many times. Another might have 500 backlinks from 300 referring domains because its links come from a larger number of separate websites.
Neither set of numbers tells you by itself whether the backlinks are good or useful. They simply describe different parts of the link picture. Our What Are Backlinks resources can help you explore the different ways those incoming links work.
Why Do SEO Tools Show Referring Domains Separately?
A total of 200 backlinks tells you how many links were found, but it does not tell you how many different websites created them. Those 200 backlinks could come from 200 websites, 20 websites, or only a few.
The referring domain count fills in that missing information by showing how many separate domains those backlinks came from.
This is especially useful when one website links to another repeatedly. A link might even appear across many pages of the same website, creating multiple backlinks while still coming from a single referring domain. Ahrefs describes one version of this situation in its explanation of sitewide links.
Do More Referring Domains Mean Better SEO?
Not automatically.
If 100 different domains link to a website, you know that its backlinks came from 100 separate sources. What that number does not tell you is whether those websites are relevant, reputable, or whether the individual links make sense.
Twenty unrelated or spammy websites do not become valuable simply because they count as 20 referring domains.
This is why referring domains are useful for understanding where backlinks come from, rather than serving as a simple measure of backlink quality. They become much more informative when viewed alongside the other links and sources that make up a website’s backlink profile.
