What Makes For a Quality Backlink?

First published in 2014, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

Backlinks remain one of the more misunderstood parts of SEO. Every few years someone declares them dead, and every few years they turn out to still matter, just not in the way link builders used to treat them. Piling up as many links as possible stopped working a long time ago, and Google has spent the years since making that approach actively risky rather than merely ineffective.

The core question hasn't changed: what actually makes a backlink good? The answer is still built on a handful of consistent principles, though the context around them has moved on a great deal.

What's changed since this was first written

Google's Penguin update went real-time in 2016, folding link-spam detection directly into the core algorithm rather than treating it as a periodic penalty round. That means poor-quality links are now devalued or penalised continuously, not occasionally. Google has also formalised the idea of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) as part of how it assesses quality, and its spam policies now explicitly call out link schemes, paid links that pass PageRank without disclosure, and low-value guest post networks built purely for links.

If you inherited a backlink profile from an old SEO campaign, it's worth reviewing it. Google's Disavow Tool still exists for genuinely toxic links you can't get removed, though Google itself says most sites never need to use it. The bigger shift is that "more links" is no longer a strategy anyone credible pursues. The principles below are what's left once quantity is off the table.

Links from relevant sources

Relevance is still the most important factor, arguably more so now than in 2014. A link doesn't need to come from a near-identical business, but it should make sense in context. A catering business earning a link from a crockery manufacturer is logical. A fishing supplier getting a link from a retirement planning site is not, and Google's systems are considerably better at spotting that mismatch than they were a decade ago.

Links from sources you trust

Some sites carry inherent credibility: the BBC, established trade publications, well-known industry bodies, government and education sites. A link from a source like this still says a great deal about your own site's standing, because the association implies a level of vetting or scrutiny.

The practical route to these links now is usually digital PR rather than direct outreach asking for a backlink. Coverage, commentary, data-led stories and expert quotes tend to earn links from trusted publications far more reliably than a request ever will.

Links that actually send traffic

It's easy to forget that a backlink's original job is to send someone from one page to another. A link placed somewhere busy and relevant can bring direct referral traffic and conversions, on top of any SEO value. When you're building or earning links, it's still worth asking whether a real person would ever click it, not just whether a crawler would count it.

Links placed in the body of the content

A link embedded naturally within the main text of a page still carries more weight, and gets more clicks, than one tucked into a footer, sidebar or generic resources list. These placements are harder to secure and usually require the content itself to be genuinely worth linking to, but they remain the most valuable kind.

A quick checklist

• Is the linking site relevant to your industry or audience, even loosely?
• Would you trust that site if you found it independently?
• Does the page actually get visited, and would people plausibly click through?
• Is the link inside the main body of the content, not buried in a footer?
• Was it earned through genuine coverage or a useful resource, rather than paid for or exchanged?

None of this makes link building easy, and it was never meant to be quick. But the fundamentals haven't moved: a good backlink comes from a relevant, trustworthy source, sits in content people actually read, and has a reasonable chance of sending someone to your site. Build towards those four things and the rest of your SEO effort has something solid to sit on.