Features
Backlinks: the native engine
NeoRank builds its own backlink corpus rather than showing a third-party index. It is partial and says so: every figure carries its observation window. The NeoRank authority score comes from the public Common Crawl web graph, with its release, date and formula.
The native corpus
The “NeoRank Engine (native corpus, partial coverage)” section lists the external links to your site found in pages the NeoRank Engine crawled or imported from the Common Crawl archives. For each link: linking page, anchor, rel attributes (follow, nofollow, ugc, sponsored), first and last observation (UTC).
| Indicator | Definition |
|---|---|
| Observed window | The corpus's first and last observation, in UTC. |
| Referring domains | Exact hosts: www and each subdomain count separately. |
| Linking pages | Distinct pages containing at least one link to you. |
| rel split | follow / nofollow / ugc / sponsored, as written in the HTML. |
NeoRank spam signals
A transparent heuristic, computed per referring domain over the native corpus. The 0–100 score is the sum of the signals that fired:
| Signal | Points |
|---|---|
| Commercial anchors (fixed French / English lexicon) | 25 |
| Sitewide link | 20 |
| Pages overloaded with outbound links | 20 |
| Link farm | 20 |
| Anchor in a different script than the page | 10 |
| Comment links (ugc) | 5 |
Thin content and known-bad domain lists are “Not evaluable” (the corpus stores no page text, no list is downloaded) and count 0: the score is a floor. It is neither a toxicity score nor Google's judgement. “See the signals and resolution” details each signal (value, threshold, weight), the anchors, the linking pages and the steps.
The disavow draft
- “Download the disavow.txt draft” lists the domains at 50/100 or more that have at least one follow (or rel-unknown) link; domains whose links are all already nofollow, ugc or sponsored are excluded.
- NeoRank never submits a disavow file to Google. Review it line by line: a badly targeted disavow can remove useful links.
The NeoRank authority score
The “NeoRank authority score” (Overview and Backlinks) comes from the Common Crawl web graph, domain level: a public dataset, published about once a month, each release covering three months of crawling (for example cc-main-2026-jul-aug-sep, 133,241,980 domains). NeoRank reads the release's ranks file and keeps only the tracked domains (your sites and their stored competitors).
| Item | Definition |
|---|---|
| Rank | The domain's position by harmonic centrality in that release's graph (1 = the most central). |
| Score | 100 × (1 − ln(rank) / ln(number of domains)), rounded, between 0 and 100. #1,000 → 63, #1,000,000 → 26, #10,000,000 → 14. |
| PageRank rank | Shown for information, not used in the score. |
| Release and dates | The release id, its publication date and NeoRank's import date always come with the score. |
- “Not ranked in the Common Crawl <release> graph”: the whole file was read and the domain is not in it (too few links from the crawled pages). It is not a score of 0.
- “Not looked up yet”: the release was imported before this domain was tracked; it will be looked up at the next import.
- “Not imported yet”: NeoRank has not imported any release yet.
- The score only moves with a new release: compare release to release. Levers: earn real referring domains, get doubtful links removed or qualified, look after internal linking.
The provider's historical data
Totals, authority and link samples came from the market-data provider retired on 26/09/2026. They stay shown as “Historical data — retired provider”, with their date. The authority-tier cards cover a capped sample, not the total. That historical authority stays on its own dated line and is never mixed with the NeoRank authority score.
What to do with this data
- Spot the pages of your site that receive the most links: they are your best entry pages; keep them current and answering 200.
- Examine high-score domains before any disavow.
- To earn links, start from the domains AI engines cite on your topics (Digital PR and citations).