What makes
a backlink good.
Most advice measures links with a score. A better test is three questions you can answer by reading the page.
Three questions
- Is the page about something you do? The page, not the site. One article that fits you exactly on a general publication can beat a whole site that is only loosely in your field. Read the page the link would be on, not the homepage.
- Is there a reason for the link to be there? A sentence that already points at what you make, a list that is missing you, a question you answer. If the editor would have added your link anyway had they known you existed, that is a reason. If the only reason is that you asked, or paid, it is not.
- Would a reader click it? A link in the middle of the article, next to the sentence it supports, gets read. The same link in a footer, a sidebar or an author bio mostly does not.
A link that passes all three is good whatever any tool says about it. A link that fails all three is worthless whatever a tool says about it.
A good one
Take an illustrator booking tool. A studio blog publishes a guide to taking your first commission, and one line reads “Give your work a home online.” A link to the booking tool on that sentence passes every test: the page is about exactly the moment someone needs it, the sentence was already recommending it, and the person reading is about to act.
That is one link. It will do more for the tool than a directory full of listings, and it is the kind an editor is glad to add, because it makes their page better.
A standard one
Most links are neither good nor harmful. A place in a roundup of eighty tools, a profile on a marketplace, a listing in a directory that real people use. They are real, and they are fine to have. They rarely send anyone, and they say little about what you do.
The trouble is spending effort on them. An email asking for the forty-eighth spot in a list costs the same as one asking for the sentence that needs you.
A spam one
Google’s spam policies describe links meant to manipulate rankings as link spam, and give examples. Among them:
- Buying or selling links that pass ranking credit.
- Excessive link exchanges: “link to me and I’ll link to you.”
- Links created by automated programs or services.
- Guest posting or article campaigns at scale with keyword-rich anchor text.
- Low-quality directory and bookmark sites.
- Links spread across the footers or templates of many sites, or hidden in widgets.
- Forum comments with optimized links.
At best these are ignored. At worst the site that relies on them ranks lower. Paying for a link is not itself the problem: Google asks that paid and sponsored links be marked with a rel="sponsored" attribute, which tells it not to count them. What breaks the rules is paying for the ranking credit.
About scores
Domain Rating, Domain Authority and Authority Score are not Google’s numbers. Each is an estimate that an SEO tool company makes from its own crawl of the web. They are a reasonable first filter, since a site with no real audience is a warning sign, and a poor goal, because they say nothing about whether the page fits you or whether anyone will read it.
About nofollow
A link marked nofollow, sponsored or ugc asks Google not to pass ranking credit through it. Google treats these as hints rather than rules. Either way, the link still sends readers. A nofollowed link in an article your buyer reads can be worth more than a followed one nobody sees.
About anchor text
Write it the way the sentence would be written anyway. Exact keyword phrases repeated across many sites are one of the patterns Google’s spam policies call out. “Their booking tool” in a sentence that makes sense is better than “best booking software for artists” in one that does not.
How BackLynx uses this
BackLynx only goes after the first kind. For every site it finds it has to name the page and the reason, and if it cannot, no email is written. That is the whole rule: no page and no reason, no email.