Why Backlink Authority Scores Disagree (DR, DA, AS) and Which One to Trust

November 3, 2026Link Building

Why backlink authority scores disagree: DR, DA and Authority Score shown as three gauges reading differently

On October 30, 2026, I checked six websites as link prospects. One of them had a Domain Rating of 71 in Ahrefs and a Domain Authority of 24 in Moz. Same site, same day, 47 points apart.

A second site looked like an easy yes. DR 56, DA 43, a clean Spam Score. Then I opened its traffic report in Semrush. Its US organic traffic had dropped 98% in a single month.

If you buy links, sell them or vet sites for clients, you run into this every week. Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush and Majestic all score the same domain. They rarely agree, and the gaps can be large enough to flip your decision.

The short answer: no single authority score deserves your full trust. Each one measures something different. Use them to build a shortlist, then judge the site on its traffic and its backlinks.

Links still matter a lot for rankings, as these link building statistics show. That is exactly why picking the wrong site hurts. Below, you’ll see what each score measures and the real numbers from my six sites. Then we’ll cover why the scores clash and the checks I run before I approve a site.

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Ecommerce Link Building: What 97,846 Store Backlinks Show

September 20, 2026ecommerce, Link Building

Illustration of backlinks flowing into an online store: thick arrows arrive at the homepage while progressively thinner ones reach the category, collection and product pages below

Link building for an online store has a problem that content sites do not have.

Nobody wants to link to a product page. There is nothing to cite. It is a photo, a price and a buy button, and it may not exist in six months.

Meanwhile the pages that actually take money sit two or three clicks deep. The links you do earn land on the homepage instead.

We pulled our own data to check. Store links really do pile up on the homepage. But the part about deep links being impossible turns out to be wrong.

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Local Link Building for Multi-Location and Service-Area Businesses: A Citation-First Framework

August 21, 2026SEO Local

Most link building advice assumes one website. One domain authority score. One backlink profile to grow. Plenty of excellent guides on this blog do the same. That works fine for a SaaS company or an online store. Now hand it to a plumber who covers six towns. Or a cleaning company working across three counties. Or an HVAC business with a service radius instead of a storefront.

The job here is different in kind. These businesses have to earn trust in five, ten, or twenty local markets at once. Apply a single-score playbook and the budget leaks out fast. Effort that would compound on one domain gets spread thin instead, across markets that each need their own signals. So they need a framework shaped like the real problem. Not a generic guide with a few local examples bolted on.

This guide lays out that framework. It starts from the geographic relevance shift documented in Whitespark’s annual ranking factors research. It then adds AI generated answers, which have become a second audience for the same signals. Everything below assumes “local” means a multi-city footprint or a service radius. Not a single address.

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Brand Search Cannibalisation, How to Tell When Google Ads Is Stealing Your Organic Clicks

August 7, 2026SEO Analytics

Every SEO gets asked this question eventually. The client sees a line item for branded search in the Google Ads invoice, works out that people typing the company name were going to find the site anyway, and asks why anyone is paying for that.

It is a fair question. I have given the opinion answer plenty of times myself, usually some version of “competitors will take the click if you stop”, which sounds right and proves nothing.

I have spent 20 years in ecommerce marketing and audited more than 1,300 online stores, working both sides of this argument, and I can count on one hand the accounts where somebody had actually measured it. The rest had a position, usually inherited from whoever set the account up, and a slide in the monthly deck defending it. So here is the test rather than the opinion. What the research says, how to set the measurement up, how to run the pause without wrecking it, and how to read what comes back.

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Link Building Statistics 2026: What 865,000 Monitored Backlinks Reveal

June 16, 2026SEO

Most link building statistics posts say the same thing. They quote the same studies. They recycle numbers from 2019 and label them 2026.

We did something different. We went into Linkody’s own database.

Linkody monitors backlinks for a living. So we pulled the numbers from more than 865,000 real backlinks that our users actively track. Then we checked every finding against the best outside research we could verify.

This is what the data actually shows about backlinks in 2026. How they look. How they age. How many quietly die. And whether they still matter at all.

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How to Track Your Brand’s Citations in AI Search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews)

June 1, 2026SEO

Search used to be simple. Someone typed a query. Google showed ten blue links. You fought to reach the top of page one.

That world is fading fast. People now ask ChatGPT for product picks. They ask Perplexity to run their research. They read Google’s AI Overview and never scroll. The answer shows up before the click does.

This is not a hunch. Gartner expects traditional search volume to fall 25% by 2026 as people lean on AI chatbots and answer engines. The shift is already underway.

Here is the catch. You can rank well in organic search and still be missing from these AI answers. The reverse happens too. An AI engine might quote your article while you sit nowhere near the top of the results page.

So how do you know if any of this is working for you? You measure it.

This guide is about AI citation tracking. You will learn what a citation is, why it matters in 2026, how the engines pick their sources, and how to watch your own presence across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Let’s dig in.

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