Glossary
A backlink glossary for the pillar-and-cluster client call
Fifteen terms that trip clients up, each with one line on what it means in a cluster plan and one line on what it does not mean.
Cluster vocabulary
| Term | Means | Does not mean |
|---|---|---|
| Pillar page | The broad guide that the cluster links up to | The page with the most traffic |
| Cluster post | A narrower article that supports the pillar | A throwaway blog post |
| Internal link | A link between pages of the same site | A backlink |
| Search intent | What the searcher wants to do | The keyword itself |
| Control page | A page you leave without links to compare | A page that is ignored |
| Topic cluster | A pillar plus the posts that support it, planned together | A list of related keywords |
Link vocabulary
| Term | Means | Does not mean |
|---|---|---|
| Backlink | A link from another site to yours | A ranking guarantee |
| Tier | Here: which page gets the strongest placements | A chain of links pointing at links |
| Donor | The site that carries the link | A site you control |
| Referring domain | A distinct site linking to you | The number of links |
| Domain Rating | Ahrefs' score for a site's link strength | A Google metric |
| Dofollow | A link that passes signals by default | A link that must rank |
| Anchor text | The clickable words of the link | Something to over-optimise |
| Editorial placement | A link inside a written article | A directory entry |
| Link insertion | A link added to an existing article | A new post |
| Proforma invoice | A payment document issued before payment | A tax invoice |
Two words that cause most of the confusion
Clients hear tier and picture a ladder of links built on links. In this marketplace there is no ladder: each placement points straight at the page you choose, and the word tier only labels how you rank your own pages.
Domain Rating is the other one. It is an Ahrefs number, so Moz and Semrush will show different figures for the same site, and none of them is a score that Google publishes.
Say that out loud once. It saves a long email later.
Tool names you will hear
Ahrefs and Semrush are the two platforms clients mention most, and both crawl the web on their own schedule. Moz and Majestic publish their own authority scores.
Search Console is Google's own free tool. It shows impressions, clicks and average position for your pages, and it is the only one of these that reports what Google itself recorded.
When a client quotes a number, ask which tool it came from and on what date. Two honest tools can disagree by a wide margin, and that does not mean either is broken.
Our own marketplace rows come from our own crawler and our own index, so treat them as a separate source again. See the order walkthrough to see where each number appears.
Write the date of every export on the slide.
Before the call, check that you can answer
- Which page is the pillar and which are the cluster posts
- How many placements went to each, and what they cost
- Which tool the referring-domain numbers came from, and when
- Which pages were left as controls
- What will not be promised
Google events worth knowing by name
Penguin became part of the core algorithm in September 2016. The link spam update of December 2022 brought SpamBrain into link evaluation.
The March 2024 core update added new spam policies, including scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. A client who reads the news may ask about each of them.
Your answer is short: relevance and restraint, not volume. The cluster budget shows how that looks in money.