No SEO strategy is complete without link building. Quality backlinks are a highly influential factor that search engines like Google check for when crawling your content and deciding what rank to assign your website.
But with dozens of different types of backlinks floating around, figuring out what backlinks to prioritize and which ones to stay far away from can be tough to crack.
When you consider that investing in building the wrong links can have far-reaching and damaging effects on your website’s presence, ranking, and performance, making a move gets even more complicated.
In this guide, I will:
- break down 20+ backlink types that you can build
- explore how they work, their importance, and their impact on SEO
- share best practices to implement in your link-building strategy, and
- costly mistakes to avoid.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are outbound links that lead from one website to another. Unlike internal links that connect pages on your website to one another, backlinks come from an external web page to yours.
Think of backlinks like a rating. The more ratings you get from other sites, the greater the signal it sends to search engines that the content of your website is worth being pushed to the top, so more people can appreciate and benefit from it.
However, all backlinks are not cut from the same cloth. Some backlinks come from high-ranking, authoritative, and trustworthy websites, while others come from lower-reputation websites. Better quality backlinks increase your ranking potential in search engine results pages (SERPS).
The Importance of Backlinks in SEO
Backlinks are integral to search engine optimization (SEO) because they enable search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to evaluate the quality, credibility, and relevance of content on a webpage or website.
Essentially, search engines see backlinks as a vote of confidence from your peers. If other pages are linking to your page, surely they think it has something worthwhile to offer such as informative content, valuable services, or useful products.
Impact of link building on organic search rankings
If your website is getting lots of backlinks from great sources, search engines will interpret this to mean your website is trustworthy and authoritative. They will be incentivized to get it in front of more people by boosting its ranking. With higher search rankings comes more organic traffic, more awareness about your goods and services, more leads generated, and possibly more conversions for your business.
In the same way that securing high-quality backlinks can positively impact your SEO performance, having low-quality backlinks can harm your site’s reputation and ranking. Consider consulting experienced link-building services like GrowthOG to ensure you’re implementing the right strategies to build strong website backlinks.
4 Types of Backlinks Based on Link Attribute
These types of links tell Google how to read and take action on a backlink based on the attribute rel=“ that it contains. Google currently has four recommended attributes that can be used to provide directions to the search engine on what to do with a given backlink.
Dofollow backlinks
Dofollow backlinks are links without the rel=” attribute included in the source code. They are the default type of links and they instruct search engines to follow the link, crawl, and index the destination page.
Example:
<a href="/greatbacklink.com">great backlinks</a>Dofollow links are the best type of links for improving website rankings and building domain authority because they allow search engines to pass on link equity—also known as link juice or authority—from the linking page to the destination page.
Working with a link-building expert or an agency like GrowthOG is key to ensuring that you get good dofollow backlinks that align with your marketing budget, plan, and goals.
Nofollow backlinks
Nofollow backlinks are links that include the HTML attribute rel=”nofollow” in their source code, directing search engines to ignore the link instead of following it and passing on link juice.
Example:
<a href="https://greatbacklink.com/" rel="nofollow">Visit Great Backlink’s homepage</a>The nofollow attribute was created to fight link spamming. It’s typically used for certain kinds of links that may be prone to manipulation such as advertisements or containing questionable content. Using the nofollow tag allows you to link to a website or page without vouching for it.
Although nofollow links are thought to have less impact on website SEO, they can still do a great job of beefing up your link profile and driving brand awareness and referral traffic.
Sponsored backlinks
Sponsored or paid backlinks are used when a link has been bought or sponsored by the website owner or an advertiser. Say you have an affiliate program and one of your partners adds a link to your product page on their website in exchange for a commission whenever people click on that link and buy something, that link is a sponsored backlink.
Other places where sponsored backlinks can be used include paid ads, press releases, guest posts, and news articles. For transparency, these backlinks need to be labeled with the rel=”sponsored” attribute, so Google knows that they are tied to a monetary intent and are not organic.
Example:
<a href="https://greatbacklink.com/" rel="sponsored">Affiliate link to a useful service</a>Since sponsored backlinks don’t pass on link equity, they may not produce significant SEO results. However, they can benefit your brand in other ways such as increasing website traffic and brand visibility.
User-generated content (UGC) backlinks
User-generated backlinks are links that are marked with the rel=”ugc” attribute to inform search engines that the content being linked to was created or submitted by users. These backlinks are usually found in social media profiles, blog comments, customer reviews, forum posts, etc.
Example:
<a href="https://greatbacklink.com/" rel="ugc">This is a user generated product video</a>While UGC backlinks can drive awareness, engagement, and referral traffic, they’re considered lower-quality links compared to other backlink types. They also don’t do much in terms of improving SEO rankings.
However, since UGC links are highly susceptible to spam and often implicated in other shady grey-hat SEO practices, appropriately tagging UGC backlinks can keep your website from incurring penalties.
20 Types of Backlinks Based on Link Building Efforts
Here’s a breakdown of different backlink types, how they work, what they contribute to SEO, and how you can acquire them to build a robust and diverse backlink profile:
1. Editorial backlinks
Editorial backlinks are website mentions that you earn when a website embeds your links in its content organically, providing additional value to its audience.
These backlinks usually come from reputable platforms like industry blogs and news websites. They heavily influence SEO because they’re dofollow links that pass on link juice and signal to search engines that your website is useful and worth pointing to.
To earn editorial backlinks, publish original, valuable, and evergreen content like reports, interviews, infographics, and comprehensive guides that authoritative websites can discover and share with their audience.
Alternatively, you can reach out to or build relationships with other website owners, influencers, bloggers, and journalists in the same or related niche, share your content with them, and ask them to link to your page.
You can also acquire these editorial links by outsourcing to agencies like GrowthOG that offer link-building services through a vast content distribution network using powerful, results-driven outreach strategies. They can create captivating content for niche-relevant websites and slip in backlinks to your site organically, boosting your brand authority and customer trust.
2. Guest post backlinks
Guest post backlinks are links that you gain by writing and submitting blog posts to other websites or publications. When crafting your guest post, you can weave in links to your website wherever they fit in naturally, using relevant anchor text.
Guest posting can help establish your brand as a thought leader and allow you to draw link juice from websites to improve your domain authority and ranking. It also allows you to place your brand in front of audiences who are likely to be interested in what you’re selling, sending qualified traffic to your pages.
If the content you create is high quality and easy to understand, you can earn the trust of website owners or editors and build relationships that constantly generate additional backlinks for your business.
The trick to gaining guest post links is to find trustworthy websites in your niche that are seeking guest posts, then pitch a content idea or submit a blog post that you’ve written that the publication would be interested in.
3. Guest post bio backlinks
Most websites that accept guest posts will usually allow authors to write short descriptions or bios of themselves, including links to their website or social media profiles.
These links are known as guest bio backlinks and they are useful for boosting authority and directing traffic to relevant pages.
They allow readers to learn more about the author and see what else they have to offer. However, you need to ensure you’re creating top-notch content that inspires and educates, prompting them to click on your bio links.
4. Press release (PR) backlinks
Press release (PR) backlinks are links placed in press releases to announce news stories, events, business developments, or other vital and relevant information about a brand.
For example, if your company gets acquired by another organization, raises significant funding to supercharge growth, or releases a new research study, you can circulate this information by putting out press release articles in various media outlets. Your press release can contain links to the study you’re trying to promote or pages on your website that provide additional information about the story and your business.
Press release backlinks help with promoting your brand and drawing traffic. They are typically nofollow links, so they may not pass on link equity or directly affect your SEO performance.
However, depending on how interesting your content or news story is, other publications may report on it and mention your brand, sending precious dofollow links your way.
5. Link insertions
Link insertions are also known as niche edit backlinks. They are created by getting a website to add a link to your site in their existing content.
For example, if you have an insurance adjusting company and you discover a site with a blog post about how to appeal a denied insurance claim, you can contact the site owner and ask them to feature your relevant link in the post.
Be sure to explain how including your link would enhance the content piece and benefit readers in your pitch. Target websites with whom you share similar audience profiles or that create content around topics relevant to your business.
Bear in mind that these kinds of backlinks are not easy to land, especially for free, so you will probably have to put up with a lot of rejection to gain a few yeses.
6. Broken links
Broken backlinks are links that are gotten by tracking down dead links for your competitors’ websites and replacing them with links to your site.
Let’s say you come across content that’s linking to someone else’s site, but when you click the link, it no longer works because the URL has changed, the page has moved, or the content has been deleted.
You can take advantage of this situation by finding or creating content that can be substituted for the broken link, then reaching out to the owner of the linking page and suggesting your content as a replacement.
Identifying broken links using Ahrefs
As long as your content is high-quality and relevant, the website owner will probably appreciate you bringing the broken links to their attention because it allows them to enhance the content experience for their readers. Chances are they will be happy to reward you with a backlink that directs to your content and passes on sweet link juice to your site.
Use SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to identify broken competitor links on authoritative niche-relevant websites that you can swoop in and claim for yourself.
7. Unlinked brand mentions
When a website says something about your brand, reports, or services without adding a hyperlink to your site, that’s an unlinked brand mention. These mentions are ripe for conversion into backlinks.
The website already knows about you and finds something about your business to be worth mentioning, so it would be easier to get them to link to you than if you were sending a cold link outreach request.
If you’re using a tool like Ahrefs, you can easily find unlinked mentions for your brand by typing in your company’s name into the content explorer, selecting search filters, clicking “Highlight unlinked” and typing your domain name.
Screen the results and identify the ones that share topical relevance with your brand and have high domain authority. Those are the prospects you will be reaching out to turn those passive brand mentions into links.
8. Reciprocal links
Reciprocal links, also known as link exchanges, are mutually beneficial arrangements enabling you to acquire links from websites by trading them with the website owners. So, for every backlink that you earn from them, you have to give one back and vice versa.
Collaborating with other webmasters or content managers in similar or complementary niches to swap links between your sites can be a great way to get your brand in front of the right audience and improve your SEO profile.
Still, you want to use it conservatively and make sure that the backlinks you exchange are naturally inserted into the content. Otherwise, you risk violating Google’s guidelines and could get penalized for trying to manipulate search results.
9. Testimonial backlinks
It’s just as the name says; testimonial backlinks are links gotten through testimonials or reviews submitted on other sites. It’s a sweet way to earn backlinks without working too hard. Businesses love testimonials because they serve as social proof to other customers that their products or services work as promised.
To prove that a testimonial or review is coming from a real person, brands generally include relevant links to the reviewer’s social pages, store, or website. This way the reviewer gets to better their domain authority and search position through connections with esteemed brands and service providers.
Start building testimonial backlinks by making a list of the products and services that you use and love, then reach out to the businesses, to see if they would be interested in a testimonial from your brand.
10. Links in exchange for a service
Brands can enter contracts with other businesses where they receive backlinks in exchange for services. Typically, these backlinks appear in the footer but they can also be included in other content fields like blog posts, sidebars, widgets, and landing pages.
Links can be exchanged for any kind of service. For instance, a software company may offer clients cost savings on their subscription or license and, in return, get a backlink on the client’s site. Similarly, a content marketer can agree to create content campaigns at a discounted rate for a startup in exchange for a couple of dofollow link placements.
Depending on the type and placement of the link that you bargain for, bartering links can positively impact your SEO status and drum up more referral traffic for your brand.
11. Business listing backlinks
Business listing backlinks are links embedded in business profiles published on trusted industry-specific websites and business directories such as InsiderPages, Yelp, Crunchbase, Better Business Bureau, and Google My Business.
They’re one of the easiest types of backlinks to get because all you need to do is go to the site’s landing page to claim or create a profile for your business and fill in the required information, which often includes a link to your website.
Remember that the goal shouldn’t be to list your business in every directory in existence. Choose the most relevant and authoritative ones and devote your attention to crafting a compelling listing.
Business listing backlinks are great for expanding your digital footprint, increasing website traffic, cultivating brand trust, and improving local SEO.
12. Podcast backlinks
When you appear on a podcast or your brand gets mentioned in show notes for a podcast organically, you can earn valuable backlinks.
Podcast backlinks usually show up in guest introductions, episode descriptions, and episode transcripts on websites or podcast listening platforms.
Podcast backlinks can work a lot of magic for your brand by strengthening your search presence, improving your reputation in your industry, and exposing you to new audiences.
13. Badge backlinks
You earn badge backlinks when an organization or website issues you a digital badge that links to your site. These badges may be given out in recognition of your contributions, achievements, or partnership, or to prove that you’ve obtained a certification or fulfilled some obligation.
The awarding organization will typically mention or publish announcements about awardees and the badges they have earned somewhere on their site with corresponding backlinks.
14. Social media backlinks
Social media backlinks are links to your site placed on social platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). They can be added in bios, posts, comments, replies, tweets, and content descriptions shared by your business or other social media users.
They are often tagged as nofollow links, preventing them from transferring direct SEO value. However, they can still bring increased reach, engagement, awareness, recognition, and referral traffic for your brand, which can indirectly influence search rankings.
The best way to earn social media backlinks is to produce original and engaging content such as videos, blog posts, and images that attract and resonate with viewers, compelling them to share it with their network.
15. Image backlinks
You receive image backlinks when other websites use your original images such as photos, animations, charts, screenshots, and infographics in their content, and credit you as the source.
They can impact your search visibility, allow you to rank for targeted or difficult keywords, and help draw more visitors to your website.
To take full advantage of image backlinks, create and upload high-quality, captivating images optimized with the right keywords and relevant descriptions.
You can perform a reverse image search on Google to locate sites that are using your images without crediting you. Contact them and ask that they correct this error by adding a backlink.
16. Paid backlinks
Building a strong backlink profile organically can take a while and you may not be prepared to wait until your efforts start bearing fruit. In such a case, you may want to resort to buying links.
Paid backlinks allow you to grow your backlink profile and reap the rewards faster without going to too much trouble. There are two routes you can go in gaining these backlinks: paying a professional link-building service like GrowthOG or paying a website owner for link placement in their content.
Whichever option you choose, make sure that you will be getting quality links that have been generated using dubious SEO practices.
Remember that Google frowns against links that are bought and paid for. To avoid making the algorithm wise to your practices, take great care with your paid backlinks strategy so your efforts don’t backfire.
17. Video backlinks
These come from links that are included in video descriptions, video credits, or comments posted on video hosting and streaming platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Brightcove.
Depending on how video backlinks are tagged, they can provide you with link juice or indirect SEO potential via referral traffic, brand visibility, and engagement. You can generate video backlinks by creating compelling shareable videos and uploading them to sites like YouTube along with relevant keywords and descriptions.
This way, it will show up in searches, and people who find it engaging or informative can feature it on their website or share it on other platforms while giving you credit.
3 Types of Backlinks Based on Anchor Text
Anchor text can significantly impact a website’s SEO efforts, and a mix of exact match, partial match, and branded backlinks is recommended for a thriving profile.
Exact match anchor text
Exact match backlinks are links with anchor texts that contain the exact keywords that the linked page is targeting.
For example, if you create a landing page for a free template targeting the keyword “career management” and another website adds a backlink to that page using the anchor text “career management,” that’s an exact match.
Exact match backlinks can help boost page rankings for target keywords when used now and then. But when they’re applied excessively, they can lead to your site getting penalized.
Partial match anchor text
This refers to backlink anchor text that uses a variation of the keyword the destination page is optimizing for.
For instance, a domain pointing to a page targeting the keywords “employee engagement” may use “how to measure employee engagement,” or “an HR manager’s guide to employee engagement” as the backlink’s anchor text.
Partial match backlinks allow you to naturally weave in links and add additional context for the linked content. They are a safer alternative to exact match backlinks.
Branded backlinks
When a brand’s name is made to stand in as the anchor text, that’s a branded backlink. These links work well when linking to a brand’s homepage or adding source credit for a piece of content.
For example, a branded backlink for this domain would look something like this: “Get in touch with GrowthOG to optimize your link-building activities.”
Pro Tip: Working with a link builder or link-building experts like GrowthOG could help you diversify the anchor texts pointing to your web pages, boosting their visibility and earning good signals from Google.
This usually involves a full content analysis to discover what kind of anchor texts your backlinks currently have and determine which types to prioritize for future link acquisitions to create a balanced profile.
What Makes High-Quality Backlinks?
The factors and characteristics that add up to valuable backlinks include:
- Dofollow link: This is any link that hands down link equity from the linking site to your site and signals to search engines that your site is relevant and trustworthy. It doesn’t contain attributes like nofollow, ugc, or sponsored in its code.
- Referring domain authority: Links coming from websites with high domain authority are much more valuable and beneficial to your SEO than links from low-authority sites.
- Content relevance: Links from websites within your niche or with topical relevance to your site perform better and signal higher levels of trust and authority to search engines.
- Natural link profile and diversity: Search engines favor natural or organic links over spammy and manipulated ones. Also, links that are sourced from a broad range of websites do more for keyword rankings and SEO authority than links from a limited number of domains.
- Contextual relevance: Links inserted naturally into the flow of content will win over their non-contextual counterparts.
- Anchor text relevance: Backlinks with anchor texts that contain appropriate keywords targeted by the linked page carry more weight than links with unrelated keywords in the anchor text.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Link Building
Rookie mistakes to stay away from when developing and implementing a link-building strategy include:
Focusing solely on quantity over quality
One natural backlink from an established and niche-relevant source is worth more than 100 links from low-level websites that are only slightly or not related to your brand.
Don’t adopt a spray-and-pray approach in haste to strengthen your backlink profile. Be selective about the kind of links you build and where you place them.
Ignoring the importance of relevance
The focus of the website that points links to your site, the keyword and topic covered by the page where your link is added, the created anchor text, and the context surrounding your link—all of those need to be relevant to the content you’re linking to.
Higher relevance means better SEO value and increased authority. The last thing you want to do is fill your profile with website backlinks with marginal correlation to your site and content. Doing so would be equivalent to toiling night and day for pennies.
Failing to monitor backlink profiles
Your search rankings can be negatively affected if your site is riddled with low-quality backlinks. To avoid this, you must carry out backlink audits once a month to identify and disown these links before they get a chance to wreak havoc on your site authority and rankings.
Consider enlisting the help of link-building experts like GrowthOG to guide you through the audit and removal process, show you how to stay on top of your backlink statuses, and keep your profile healthy and spam-free.
Using black-hat techniques
Black-hat link building refers to the usage of objectionable techniques to acquire links and manipulate search engine results without regard for the established rules and standards of the algorithm. Black-hat link SEO tactics can look like:
- Keyword stuffing
- Sneaky redirects
- Participating in link schemes
- Blog comment spamming
- Posting low-quality content
- Deploying hidden links
- Reporting a competitor
- Using link farms and private blog networks (PBNs)
Google and other search engines have a no-tolerance policy for unethical practices that contravene their guidelines, so using black hat SEO techniques to build links can earn you a penalty and set back your SEO efforts. Your website may receive a significant rank demotion or even get delisted from search results entirely.
It can take a long time and a lot of work to recover from these consequences and get your SEO back on track, so you’re better off avoiding the trap altogether.
Best Practices to Acquire Quality Backlinks
Here are the right ways to go about building backlinks to your site:
- Creating linkable content: By focusing on creating content such as articles, studies, videos, and free templates that are relevant, shareable, and packed with value, you can make it easier for people to link back to your content. GrowthOG is the ideal partner to collaborate with on producing quality content that’s link-worthy and aligned with your targeted keywords, preferences, and requirements.
- Creating infographics and other visual assets: Visual content is more easily shared and consumed than text, making it a powerful tool for attracting worthwhile backlinks.
- Building relationships: Networking and cultivating connections with professionals in your industry can open up opportunities for relationship-based link-building, and give you access to various sites where you can place links without jumping through hoops.
- Effective outreach: You can’t just wake up and shoot a generic request to a website asking for backlinks and expect to get it. I mean, you can, but you shouldn’t. Sending personalized, value-driven pitches increases the likelihood of your emails getting a positive response.
- Engaging in social media and online SEO communities: Participate in discussions, and share your content in relevant forums and social media groups to increase exposure and attract backlinks.
- Conducting backlink gap analyses: Improve your link-building operations by analyzing your competitors’ domains to see what backlink strategies they’re using or where their links are coming from, and uncover opportunities for your site.
- Disavowing toxic backlinks: Regularly monitor your backlink profile to detect low-quality links and disavow any spammy backlinks that could negatively impact your SEO.
Tools to Monitor Your Backlinks
Want to know what websites are linking back to you or the different types of backlinks that you’re generating?
Use these backlink tools to get the answers you need.
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker & Site Explorer
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool that offers robust backlinks monitoring features. It has a paid service and free tools with limited functionalities that you can put to work analyzing your backlink profile. Ahrefs can help you determine whether your link-building efforts are paying off and what you can do to boost your SEO performance.
Source: Ahrefs
Ahrefs delivered lots of detailed insights to give you a complete picture of your link operations and website performance. With Ahrefs, you can find out about:
- Your competitors backlinks
- How many referring websites and pages link to your domain
- The number of referring sites you gain or lose each month
- The domain rating, anchor text, and traffic for each referring site
- Which of your pages garner the most backlinks, and more.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool you can use to keep an eye on your backlinks, improve your SEO performance, and refine your link-building strategy. It provides basic information on:
Source: Google Search Console
- The number of website backlinks you’ve accumulated (each unique backlink is counted once)
- The referring domains for each backlink
- Which of your pages the backlinks are leading to
- The number of backlinks you’ve received from each site and how many of your pages they’ve linked to
- The websites that have given you the most backlinks
Semrush’s Backlink Analytics
Semrush’s Backlink Analytics Tool is a paid tool that gives you comprehensive reports on the state of your site’s backlink profile. It allows you to track and analyze the relevance, authority, and quality of the backlinks you are getting.
Source: Semrush
It gives you all the information that’s accessible on Google Search Console and extras such as:
- The type of backlinks you get based on their attribute
- The anchor text introducing the links
- The status of a backlink (is it active or lost)
- Why you lost a backlink
- The authority score and URL for the referring pages
- Which of your pages have brought in the most dofollow backlinks
Staying on top of your backlinks with GrowthOG
GrowthOG is a results-driven link-building agency that helps you manage your link-building processes from end to end. GrowthOG leverages an extensive and varied SEO experience to:
- Audit your competitor links and your existing link-building strategy
- Develop optimal strategies for attracting links with your best content assets
- Unearth quality link opportunities that are hard to come by
- Launch targeted link outreach campaigns
- Construct and maintain a flourishing link profile that transforms your SEO outlook using a relationship-based approach.
Growth OG offers several cost-effective link-building service packages to suit your brand requirements, link preferences, and budget.
Over to You
You can’t afford to rely on a single type of backlink because different backlinks have different impacts on your SEO and overall website performance. Building a diverse profile of high-quality backlinks is your ticket to moving up the SEO ladder, raising brand awareness, improving domain authority, driving organic traffic, and sustaining business growth.
Remember to regularly measure the strength of your link profile and adjust your strategy where necessary by conducting backlink audits.
Ready to build worry-free backlinks that move the needle for your brand? Take advantage of GrowthOG’s link-building services to get started.
