Good & Bad Types of Backlinks for SEO – How To Learn SEO

In this article, you will find examples of backlinks.

The ultimate goal here is to give you a list of good backlink examples and bad backlinks in SEO so that you know how to do better link building for your website or blog.

The fact is that you can create many different types of backlinks for SEO; However, only high quality backlinks will make the most impact on your search engine optimization efforts. And this guide will show you what those hyperlinks look like and what they should contain.

What are backlinks on a website?

Backlinks on a website are links that lead to a page on another website. A backlink is created when a website links to another site elsewhere in its content.

examples of backlinks

dofollow backlinks

Dofollow links are examples of backlinks that help in direct SEO by sending the PageRank authority of the original website to the destination site. A backlink is inherently a dofollow link unless the site owner adds a nofollow tag to it. Learn more about what a dofollow link is.

NoFollow Backlinks

Nofollow links are backlink instances that are tagged in a machine-readable manner so that they do not pass PageRank authority from the originating website to the destination site. The rel=”nofollow” tag is added to the HTML code in these backlinks. Learn more about what a nofollow link is.

relevant backlinks

Relevant backlinks are links placed within the main content on a website that the user reads as opposed to being placed in a header, footer or sidebar. This link here: 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 the content. An editorial link is not paid for, solicited or traded, but is obtained naturally by publishing high quality content that other site owners feel will be beneficial to their readers.

Editorial backlinks can also come in the form of quotes where a journalist reaches out to a particular person to get their opinion on a particular topic. In this case, the website would include a backlink to the specialist’s personal homepage or the company they work for. Below is an example of this type of backlink that I have acquired for SEO Chatter. Learn more about what are editorial backlinks.

author backlinks

Author backlinks are links that are located in the author bio box on a web page. These backlinks usually include hyperlinks to the homepage of the author’s website, a specific landing page, and/or social media profiles. Below is an example of a backlink for SEO Chatter in the author bio box for a guest post written on another website.

header backlinks

Header backlinks are examples of sitewide links that appear at the top of a website, usually located in the main navigation menu. A header backlink looks like it will link to a page that is on the current site; However, it is actually an outbound hyperlink that takes the user to another website.

sidebar backlinks

Sidebar backlinks are links that are located in the sidebar section (left or right) of the 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 original site.

However, during the 2012 SMX Advanced 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 past few months, we’ve been able to tell Not only is buying links like this not doing any good, we’re dialing in to tell people 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 images that include a hyperlink to an image rather than a piece of text. A common example of this link building exercise is creating infographics and asking 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 information on this off-page SEO strategy.

Javascript Backlinks

JavaScript backlinks are links that are embedded in JavaScript code. This programming language is one of the major technologies of the World Wide Web, along with HTML and CSS, and some technical SEO experts experiment by using backlinks in JavaScript code that Google’s web crawlers can parse.

What are good backlinks?

Good backlinks are relevant inbound links from a reliable, authoritative site that are natural and highly relevant to the backlinked page. A good backlink also comes from a website with a high domain authority and page authority score, such as 60 to 80, with optimized anchor text.

trusted site

First Example of a Good Backlink Getting a link from a trusted site is good for SEO because it helps your website look more trustworthy. Google’s algorithm counts high-quality links as approvals. The simple fact is that good sites connect to other good sites. You can test the trustworthiness of a website by using a tool like Moz Pro which includes the MozTrust Score which measures the global trustworthiness of a website’s inbound links.

official site

Another example of a backlink that is good for your website is a link to an authoritative site that demonstrates expertise in its field by providing trustworthy and well-sourced content that is updated regularly for accuracy. goes. Authoritative websites usually have higher domain authority scores because other sites on the Internet include backlinks to them because they are very authoritative in their industry.

natural backlinks

The best types of backlinks are natural links that are not paid for, asked for, or exchanged for services. Natural backlinks come from producing high-quality content that earns good backlinks without the website owner creating an unnatural way, which goes against it. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines,

Highly Relevant Backlinks

Many SEO experts and link building professionals agree that the best examples of good backlinks are links that come from highly relevant web pages. Therefore, you want backlinks to pages that are contextually relevant to the target URL on your website. A bad backlink that doesn’t feel natural, for example, would be a link from a page about dog training to a page on another site about car insurance.

This example of backlinks is an important concept to understand because Google’s algorithm will read the text surrounding a backlink and use it to help index the target URL for appropriate keywords. The technical term for this is “annotation text”, which is documented in Anchor Text Indexing Guide by Bill Slavsky.

high page authority

Web pages with Page Authority scores pass the highest PageRank value for SEO. Page authority is derived from other high-quality websites linking to the target URL. Therefore, good backlinks are inbound links to your site from web pages with high Page Authority scores, such as 60 to 80 on a 100-point scale.

Nice Optimized Anchor Text

According to the Search Engine RoundtableAnchor text affects rankings, said John Mueller, senior webmaster trends analyst at Google. But as Barry Schwartz wrote in the article, “Anchor text is a sign that Google uses for ranking purposes. 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.

So, if you are doing any kind of link building then you should follow a specific set of anchor text ratio optimization for earned backlinks. This way, you can reduce the chances of your link looking unnatural or spammy according to Google’s Link Planning Guidelines,

What are examples of bad backlinks?

Examples of bad backlinks include links to low-quality directories, spun content, link exchange, excessive 301 redirects, blog comment spam, sitewide footers, link wheels, hidden backlinks, and paid backlinks.

You can learn more about this topic by visiting these other pages on Bad Backlinks, Toxic Backlinks, and Link Spam.

types of backlinks

You can create many types of backlinks for the website. The backlink examples below show you the most common links you can build with link building campaigns for SEO.

• Guest Post Link Building: These are backlinks that are formed through guest blogging opportunities.
• EDU Backlinks: These are links placed on college and university websites.
• GOV Backlinks: These are links that are obtained from local, state and federal sites.
• Forum Backlinks: This is a type of backlink that comes from forum profiles, signatures, and comments on forum posts.
• PBN backlinks: These hyperlinks are created from a network of connected sites and blogs, commonly known as private blog networks.
• Social Media Backlinks: These are links to social media profiles and posts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, YouTube etc.
• Tiered Link Building: This is a backlink strategy that builds links from various sources to your website through a tiered system.
• web 2.0 backlinks: These are links to self-publishing platforms that allow user-generated content, such as Blogger, WordPress, Wix, Tumblr, Weebly, etc.
• High PR Backlinks: These are the best type of links as they come from other websites that have high PageRank (ie, Page Authority).
• HARO Backlinks: These are editorial backlinks that are created in response to journalist requests through a service called HARO.

Before we conclude this part of the guide, one more thing to note is that there is often confusion between backlinks vs inbound links; However, they are basically different words to describe the same type of hyperlink. Link building experts often use the term backlinks to describe the types of links obtained to increase search engine rankings for a website, while digital marketers who do not focus so heavily on SEO use the term inbound links for any To refer to hyperlinks that earn referral traffic. one place.

examples of backlinks summary

I hope you liked these examples of backlinks in SEO.

As you found out, there are many examples of backlinks that you can get for a website. However, the best example of a good backlink is one that has high authority, trust, relevance, optimized anchor text, and follows Google’s webmaster guidelines. If you can get that type of backlinks during a link building campaign, you will see the best results of your efforts.