What's in a Backlink Report: Columns, Terms and What to Check First
Someone hands you a spreadsheet with 3,000 rows and a dozen columns, and you are expected to know whether the money was well spent. Backlink reports look intimidating mostly because nobody explains the columns. Once you know what each one means, you can check a report in under an hour.
There are two common kinds. An audit report comes from a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz or Google Search Console and shows links the tool has found pointing to your site. A delivery report comes from a seller or agency and lists the links they built for you. They overlap, but they answer different questions. This article focuses on what goes in each. For reading the overall picture of a profile, see how to read a backlink report.
Columns you should expect
Source URL
The exact page where the link sits. This is the most important column. A report without source URLs is not a report, because you cannot verify anything.
Target URL
The page on your site the link points to. In a tiered campaign, this may be a Tier 1 page instead of your site, and the report should make that clear.
Anchor text
The clickable text. Look at the spread, not individual rows. If 60 percent of a delivery uses the same keyword phrase, that is a pattern worth worrying about. The anchor text explained article covers what a natural spread tends to look like.
Link type or placement
In-content, sidebar, footer, profile, comment, forum post, directory listing. Contextual links within the body of an article usually carry more weight than footer or profile links.
Rel attribute
Dofollow (no attribute), nofollow, sponsored or ugc. Since 2019 Google has treated these attributes as hints. A report showing 100 percent dofollow from many different site types is unusual and worth a second look.
Date found or date built
When the link appeared. Useful for matching changes in rankings to link activity, and for spotting whether a seller delivered everything at once.
Index status
Whether the source page is in Google's index. A link on a page Google never indexed is unlikely to count. Sellers sometimes report this; for audit reports you may need to check yourself. Our guide on why backlinks don't get indexed explains common reasons.
Domain metrics
DR, DA, Trust Flow, Spam Score or a tool's own rating. These are third-party estimates, not Google data. They are useful for sorting, not for deciding a link's real value on their own.
Traffic estimate
Estimated organic traffic for the source domain or page. Sites with zero traffic for years are often weak or built only to sell links.
Status
Live, lost, redirected, or broken. Audit tools track this over time and it helps you spot link rot.
How to spot-check a delivery report
You do not need to check every row. Take a random sample of 20 to 30 links, more for larger orders, and for each one:
- Open the source URL. Does the page load and is it a real page?
- Find the link. Is it there, pointing to the right target with the stated anchor?
- Check the rel attribute in the page source or with a browser extension.
- Search the exact URL in Google or use the URL inspection tool where you can. Is the page indexed?
- Glance at the site. Is it in any way relevant, or a pile of unrelated posts?
If most of your sample passes, the report is probably honest. If a big share fails, raise it with the seller and ask how they will fix it. The broken link checker can speed up the first step on a long list.
How to check an audit report
For an audit of your own profile, the useful views are:
- Referring domains over time. Gradual growth looks normal. Sudden spikes deserve an explanation.
- Anchor distribution. Mostly brand and URL anchors is typical for healthy sites.
- Top linked pages. Which pages attract links naturally, and which ones you are pushing.
- New and lost links. Track what you gained and lost each month.
- Unknown spam. Odd foreign-language sites or scraper pages. Most are harmless and ignored by Google, but obvious link networks are worth noting.
Why different tools disagree
Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Majestic run their own crawlers and see different parts of the web. Search Console shows a sample of links Google knows about, without third-party metrics. The same site can show noticeably different link counts in each. Use one main tool consistently for trends and cross-check important questions with Search Console.
What a good delivery report does not include
Ranking guarantees, vague summaries in place of URLs, or screenshots instead of a list. If the seller cannot give you a spreadsheet you can work through, you have no way to check the order.
A simple plan to follow
Take your most recent report, from a tool or a seller, and sample 20 rows using the five checks above. Note how many pass. That single number tells you more about the quality of the work than any metric column does.