Glossary

Short, sourced definitions for owners of small websites. Satelo's own terms come first, so it is clear that satellites ◉ are internal credits, not satellite sites.

Updated: 2026-10-16

Satelo terms

• Satellites ◉ (Satelo credits): Satellites (◉) are the internal credits of the Satelo network. A site earns them by publishing partner articles about other sites and spends them to get articles about itself published elsewhere in the network. They can be bought in packs but never cashed out. They have nothing to do with “satellite sites” in SEO.
• Satelo Quality Score: The Satelo Quality Score is a 0–100 rating of a website built mostly from open data: popularity lists, open link graphs, domain age, plus a crawl of the site's content and technical health. A brand-new site with no evidence of visitors or links scores close to 0. Anyone can check any domain free at /check/.

Links and link building

• Backlink exchange: A backlink exchange is any arrangement in which websites trade links instead of earning them independently: direct reciprocal swaps, three-way loops, link-exchange platforms or article exchanges. Whether it is acceptable depends on intent and labelling: trades meant to manipulate rankings are link spam; disclosed partner content with qualified links is advertising.
• Guest post: A guest post is an article written by someone outside the site and published on that site under the author's or a partner's name. Done well it brings the author readers and credibility and gives the host useful content; done as a link-buying tactic it becomes link spam.
• PBN (private blog network): A PBN (private blog network) is a group of websites controlled by one person or company and used mainly to link to a “money site” in order to raise its search rankings. The sites are often built on expired domains and disguised as independent blogs. Search engines treat this as a link scheme.
• Reciprocal link: A reciprocal link is a pair of links where site A links to site B and site B links back to site A, usually by agreement (“link to me and I'll link to you”). Occasional mutual links between related sites are normal on the web; exchanging them at scale to influence rankings is treated as a link scheme.
• rel="sponsored": rel="sponsored" is a value of the HTML rel attribute that marks a link as advertising, sponsorship or another kind of compensated placement. Google introduced it in 2019 and asks site owners to use it on paid or traded links so they are not treated as attempts to manipulate rankings.
• Three-way link exchange: A three-way link exchange (also called ABC linking) is an arrangement where site A links to site B, B links to C, and C links back to A, so no two sites link to each other directly. It is usually done to make traded links look less like reciprocal swaps.

Site metrics

• Domain Rating (DR): Domain Rating (DR) is a proprietary 0–100 metric from Ahrefs that estimates the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with other sites in Ahrefs' index. It is based on links only and is not used by Google; a higher DR means more and stronger linking domains, not more traffic.
• Tranco list: Tranco is a free, research-oriented ranking of the most popular one million domains on the web. It averages several provider rankings over 30 days to resist manipulation and daily noise, and each list gets a permanent ID so studies can cite the exact version they used.

Crawling and indexing

• Crawl budget: Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine crawler can and wants to fetch from a site in a given period. Google describes it as a combination of crawl capacity (how much your server can handle) and crawl demand (how much Google wants to crawl, based on popularity and freshness).
• IndexNow: IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for the next crawl. The site proves ownership with a key file hosted on its own domain, and a notification sent to one participating engine is shared with the others.
• noindex: noindex is a rule, set in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, that tells search engines not to show a page in search results. The crawler must be able to fetch the page to see the rule, so a page blocked in robots.txt can stay indexed despite a noindex tag.

AI search and agents

• llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed standard for a Markdown file placed at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives large language models and AI agents a short, curated overview of the site: a title, a summary, and lists of the most useful links. An optional llms-full.txt can carry the full text.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol): MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol for connecting AI applications such as Claude, ChatGPT-based tools or Cursor to external tools and data. An MCP server exposes named tools with typed inputs; an MCP client inside the AI app lists those tools and calls them when the model decides they are needed.