In this article, you will find examples of backlinks in SEO: bad, good, and best types of backlinks.
The ultimate goal here is to give you a list of bad and good examples of backlinks in SEO so that you know how to best build links for your website or blog.
The fact is that there are many types of backlinks you can build for SEO; however, only high quality backlinks will have the most impact on your SEO efforts. And this guide will show you what these backlinks look like and what they should include.
What Are Backlinks on a Website?
These are links on websites, other than yours, that point to a page on your website. Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent traffic from another website that arrives on your own website. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher in search engines like Google and Bing, as your backlinks are considered an indicator of your website's popularity among users. Performing, monitoring, and analyzing the performance of backlinks is an important aspect of search engine optimization and SEO strategies.
Example of Backlinks in SEO
Dofollow Backlinks
Dofollow links are examples of backlinks that contribute directly to SEO by passing on the authority of the PageRank of the originating website to the destination website. A backlink is automatically a dofollow link, unless the website owner adds a nofollow tag to it. Learn more about the differences between dofollow links and nofollow links.
NoFollow Backlinks
Nofollow links are examples of backlinks that are marked in a machine-readable way so as not to pass on the PageRank authority of the originating website to the destination site. The rel="nofollow" tag is added to these backlinks in the HTML code.
Contextual backlinks
Contextual backlinks are links placed in the main content of a website that the user reads, as opposed to links placed in the header, footer, or sidebar. This link: what are contextual backlinks, is an example of a contextual backlink.
Editorial Backlinks
Editorial links are examples of natural backlinks that result from a website owner linking to a web page based on the quality of its content. An editorial link is not paid, requested, or exchanged, but is received naturally by posting high quality content that other website owners believe will benefit their readers.
Editorial backlinks can also take the form of quotes, where a journalist reaches out to a particular person to get their opinion on a given topic. In this case, the website will include a backlink to the expert's personal homepage or to the company they work for. Below is an example of this type of backlink. Learn more about what are editorial backlinks.
Author Backlinks
Author backlinks are links that are found as part of the author's biography on a web page. These backlinks typically include hyperlinks to the author's website homepage, a specific landing page, and/or social media profiles. Below is an example of this type of backlink.
Header Backlinks
Header backlinks are examples of sitewide links that appear in the top section of the website, where the main navigation menu is usually located. A header backlink appears to link to a page on the actual site, but it is actually an outbound hyperlink that directs the user to another website.
Sidebar Backlinks
Sidebar backlinks are links that are located in the sidebar section (left or right) of a website's layout. These hyperlinks are considered a type of sitewide backlink because they appear on every web page.
Footer Backlinks
Footer backlinks are another type of sitewide link and are considered examples of boilerplate links. Some people try to use footer links for SEO by adding keyword-optimized anchor text to these backlinks to get as much link equity as possible from the originating website.
However, at an SMX Advanced 2012 conference in Seattle, Matt Cutts (former head of Google's web spam team) said, "We've done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, sitewide links. Over the last few months, we've been trying to get the message out that not only is buying links like this pointless, but we're upping the ante to let people know that some link spam techniques are a waste of money." (Source Search Engine Land)
Image Backlinks
Image backlinks are links to your website from graphics and photos that include hyperlinks to the image rather than a piece of text. A popular example of this link building practice is when you create infographics and ask website owners to add a backlink to your website from that image. Check out this guide on how to get backlinks from infographics for more details on this off-page SEO strategy.
JavaScript Backlinks
JavaScript backlinks are links that are integrated into the JavaScript code. This programming language is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, along with HTML and CSS, and some technical SEO experts are experimenting with using backlinks in JavaScript code that Google's crawlers can analyze.
What Are Good Backlinks?
Good backlinks are appropriate inbound links from a trusted authoritative website that are natural and highly relevant to the backlink page. A good backlink also originates from a website with high domain authority and page authority score, for example, 60 to 80, with optimized anchor text.
Trusted site
The first example of a good backlink is getting a link from a trusted website, which is good for SEO because it makes your website look more trustworthy. Google's algorithm considers high-quality links as endorsements. The point is that good sites link to other good sites. You can check the trustworthiness of a website by using a tool like Moz Pro, which includes a MozTrust score that measures the overall trustworthiness of inbound links to a website.
Authoritative website
Another example of a beneficial backlink for your website is a link from an authoritative website that demonstrates its expertise in its field by providing reliable, well-researched content that is regularly updated for accuracy. Authoritative websites usually have high domain authority scores because other sites on the Internet include backlinks to them because they are authoritative in their field.
Natural backlinks
The best type of backlinks is natural links that are not paid, requested, or exchanged for services. Natural backlinks come from producing high quality content that earns good backlinks without the website owner creating them in an unnatural way, which is against Google's webmaster guidelines.
Highly relevant backlinks
Many SEO experts and link building professionals agree that the best example of good backlinks is links that come from highly relevant web pages. Therefore, you want backlinks on pages that are topically relevant to your website's target URL. A bad backlink that doesn't look natural, for example, would be a link from a page that talks about dog training to a page on another site that talks about car insurance.
This backlink example is an important concept to understand because Google's algorithm will read the surrounding text of a backlink and use it to help index the target URL for the appropriate keywords. The technical term for this is "annotation text," which was documented in this Anchor Text Indexing Guide by Bill Slawski.
High Page Authority
Web pages with a page authority score convey the highest PageRank value for SEO. Page authority is derived from other high-quality websites that link to a target URL. Therefore, good backlinks are inbound links to your website from web pages with a high page authority score, such as 60 to 80 on a 100-point scale.
Good optimized anchor text
According to Search Engine Roundtable, John Mueller, senior webmaster trends analyst at Google, said that anchor text has an impact on rankings. But what Barry Schwartz writes in the article is that "anchor text is a signal that Google utilizes for ranking. Yes, Google can ignore spammy links that try to manipulate rankings, but normal anchor text helps Google rank a page for what the anchor text says about the page."
Therefore, if you are building links of any kind, you need to adhere to a specific set of anchor text ratio optimization for acquired backlinks. This way, you can reduce the chances of your links looking unnatural or being considered spam, according to Google's link scheme guidelines.
What Are Examples of Bad Backlinks?
Examples of bad backlinks include links from low quality directories, spun content, link exchanges, excessive 301 redirects, blog comment spam, sitewide footers, link wheels, hidden backlinks, and paid backlinks.
You can learn more about this topic by visiting this page on how to identify bad backlinks and remove them?
Types of Backlinks
There are many types of backlinks you can build for a website. The example of backlinks below shows you the most popular links you can create with link building campaigns for SEO.
- Guest Article Link Building: These are backlinks created through guest blogs.
- EDU Backlinks: These are links created through college and university websites.
- GOV Backlinks: These are links that are acquired from local, state, and federal sites.
- Forum Backlinks: These are a type of backlink that come from forum profiles, signatures, and comments on forum posts.
- PBN Backlinks: These are hyperlinks built from a network of connected websites and blogs that you own and are commonly known as Private Blog Network.
- Social Media Backlinks: These are links from social media profiles and posts on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
- Tiered Link Building: This is a backlink strategy that constructs links from a variety of sources to your website through a tiered system.
- Web 2.0 Backlinks: These are links from self-publishing platforms that allow user-generated content, such as Blogger, WordPress, Wix, Tumblr, Weebly, etc.
- High PR Backlinks: These are the best types of links because they come from other websites that have high PageRank (i.e. page authority).
- HARO Backlinks: These are editorial backlinks that are created through a service called HARO in response to requests from journalists.
Before we end this section of the guide, another thing worth mentioning is that there is often confusion between inbound links vs backlinks; however, they are simply different words to describe the same type of hyperlink. Link building experts often use the word backlinks to describe the types of links they acquire to increase a website's search engine rankings, while digital marketers who are not so much focused on SEO use the term inbound links to refer to all hyperlinks that generate referral traffic for a website.
Example of Backlinks in SEO Summary
As you have discovered, there are many examples of backlinks you can acquire for a website. But the best example of a good backlink in SEO is one that has high authority, trust, relevance, optimized anchor text, and follows Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you can get these types of backlinks during a link building campaign, you will get the best results for your efforts.
