What is the difference between "Referring Pages" and "Total Backlinks" [on Ahrefs]?

[Webrevolve]

I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference?

Any one care to help me out?

Cheers!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Paul,

There are many things this could mean to Ahrefs, so I can only really suggest contacting their own support to get the real meaning of what this is. I could make educated guesses, but they could still be wrong and would hate to misinform you.

-Andy

[William.Lau]

Referring pages is the amount of pages (URLS) pointing to your site.

Total backlinks is the total amount of links you have to your site.

Example: 10 pages have 2 links to your site.
Referring Pages: 10
Total Backlinks: 20