What Makes a Good Backlink
A strong backlink contains the following characteristics:
Relevance: It comes from a website that’s related to your business. A link from a fitness blog to your gym equipment store makes sense. A link from a gambling site to that same store will raise some alarms.
Authority: The linking site has a solid reputation and trust score of its own. These can be established newspapers, industry associations, government bodies, or well-known trade publications.
Natural placement: The link sits within useful, relevant content. It doesn’t look forced or buried in a list of 200 other links on a page that clearly exists just to distribute links.
Good anchor text: The clickable words used for the link should be contextually appropriate. “Click here” is weak. “Best budget running shoes” linking to your product page is much better.
A practical example: imagine a university’s housing advice page linking to a local property management company’s website. That’s a natural, relevant, high-authority backlink. The university isn’t in the business of selling property management, but they’re genuinely pointing students toward a useful resource. Google respects that.
What Makes a Bad Backlink
Bad backlinks are very real, and they can hurt your business.
Links from spammy, low-quality websites with no genuine audience
Links from sites in completely unrelated industries
Paid link schemes
Links that appear on pages with hundreds of other outbound links, which dilute any value they offer
If you’ve ever received an email from a stranger offering to “boost your SEO” by placing links on their network of sites, please delete it. That’s almost certainly a link scheme, and if Google catches it, your rankings will suffer.
Top comments (0)