Links

Referring domain

linking domain · referring site

Definition

Referring domain is a hostname that contains at least one link to your site. www.example.com and example.com/story are one domain. Twenty links from that domain still count as one referring domain. Digital PR teams use the count because search systems care more about independent sites than about a single blogroll that repeats your URL.

New referring domains are the campaign number. Repeat links from a friendly trade site still help users and can help retrieval. They should not be sold as “20 new domains” when they are 20 URLs on one masthead.

How it is measured

Pick a crawler and a date window. Deduplicate on registered domain or on subdomain, and say which. Some teams treat news.example.com and www.example.com as one publisher. Some treat them as two. Either rule is fine if it stays still month to month. Filter out your own properties, link networks, and comment spam.

Example: a month of digital PR produces 40 hyperlinks. The table collapses to 17 hostnames. Two hostnames are the client’s owned blogs. One is a press-release wire that nofollows everything. Live earned referring domains added = 14. A competitor’s report of “40 backlinks” describes the same month and will look twice as large in a bake-off. Ask both teams for unique domains and for a sample of the URLs.

How it differs

A backlink is the individual href. Domain authority and domain rating are vendor scores built on a link index; a new referring domain of DA 12 can be more useful than a DA 80 homepage footer if the page is on-topic and indexed. Referral traffic is clicks. A domain can refer in the SEO sense and send zero sessions.

Common errors

Counting subfolders as domains. Counting every wire reprint as a new site. Resetting the crawler and celebrating a “jump” that is an index refresh. Hunting only DA 80+ publishers and ignoring the ten specialist domains the models actually cite in the category.

Sources