Types of Backlinks in SEO

I'm gonna talk about the 3 types of backlinks “The good” “The bad” and “The worst”. The backlinks are no doubt important. Google has never revealed a complete list of search engine ranking factors in any particular order however from different announcements and studies we know the backlinks are among the top 3 search engine ranking factors. All webmasters, Content marketers, and SEO experts understand this, however, most of them are unsure what constitutes a good powerful backlink that propels their website in the search engine results pages without understanding the differences between a good backlink and 1 that can get your site penalized. It is critical when it comes to a link building strategy, you need to be 100 percent sure of the types of backlinks you should pursue and the ones you need to avoid. So let's divide backlinks into 3 categories,

Tier 1: the absolute best ones you can generate for your website. 

Tier 2: the bad ones you should avoid as much as possible.

Tier 3: the absolute worst of the worst. These will totally get your website penalized by Google and other search engines. 

Tier 1

So let's begin with Tier 1 backlinks, there are specific qualities that make a backlink a good one, to keep it simple just remember this rule, any backlink that comes naturally to your site from a relevant and authoritative source is a good one. This is also known as organic link building and it propels you higher in the search engine results pages and makes a website more authoritative and credible. Because of this, organic link building is also the toughest and most time-consuming way of generating backlinks and that's why so many SEOs turn towards spammy and quote-unquote easier ways to do that. But let's highlight a few different types of tier one backlinks. 

Editorial Backlinks 

These are the most common types of tier one. The journalists, a publisher, or a blogger creates a backlink to your website from a credible source like a publication or a well-established block. This all happened organically and naturally for instance you wouldn't even know about the journalists creating a link to your website until it's done. They only do it because they're so amazed by your website and the content you have on it. This is the purest form of backlinks that Google and all the other search engines absolutely love.

Relationship-based Backlinks

A personal relationship leads to the backlink creation process. This relationship could be built through an introduction with the journalists to bloggers or content contributors. They see your website provides genuine value and they create a backlink to your website, in order for this to be effective it still has to have the same amount of value and genuineness to it. Otherwise, it won't be effective. 

Guest Blogging

Although not as powerful as it once was Guest blogging is still a very genuine and powerful way to generate high-quality tier one backlink. Recently, Google is cracked down hard on guest posting websites that were using this technique just for creating backlinks, instead of providing genuine value to its readers. So remember that the primary purpose of guest blogging isn't to create backlinks, it's to provide genuine value to the readers of that blog. So if you want to go this route the best strategy would be to guest blog only as a way to expand your brand and to reach a larger audience instead of building backlinks in mind. Consider backlinks as being a by-product of guest blogging, not the primary goal. 

Niche Directories

You'll probably cringe at these next 2 words Niche Directories. I know you're thinking, aren't these the bane of the SEO world? And you're not wrong, general directories are dead and must be avoided at all costs. However, Niche directories are a bit different and they can be a great source of generating powerful backlinks to your website. But we're still talking about respectable established one. Yelp, the Better Business Bureau (BBB), the Yellow pages, Best of the Web, these are all high-quality niche directories and they can be good for you. Just make sure to write different descriptions in each, one's visitors will find useful. If you copy-paste or if you automate directory submissions then they'll end up looking exactly like what they are. “Spammy backlinks”, Google hates these and will penalize you for them. 

Tier 2

Now let's move on to Tier 2 backlinks, the type you should generally avoid. They don't really add any value to your rankings in the first place and we expect that Google may eventually penalize you for them in the near future. Okay maybe it's worth a fake if you happen to have a chance of creating tons of these with minimal effort but in our experience time spent on tier 2 backlinks just isn't worth it, in any case let's cover some examples of these. 

Guest Posting

The successful guest posting takes a lot of time and effort however there are a lot of folks out there who write a post to get it published on a website then spin the content creating dozens of similarly modified versions and getting them published on different websites to acquire backlinks. As you can imagine credible websites don't accept such rehashed content so these folks get in touch with low quality and often irrelevant websites that have nothing but dozens of ads on their web pages or similar spun content. This doesn't do your brand any favors and no one cares to read second rate content anyway. Furthermore, it creates a content pattern that Google can track and easily identify, so this strategy is best avoided.

Links coming from headers, footers, inside bars aren't valuable for Google either. This is why site-wide links should be avoided.

Tier 3

Now let's get to the juicy stuff, Tier 3, the nastiest of the nasty. Building these types of backlinks will get your website penalized in the search engine results pages for sure. Let's look at some of the common ones.

Paid Links

paid links, even if it's on a very small scale, buying links is still a horrible idea that you must avoid at all costs because let's face it even if a website owner is just selling a couple of backlinks to you it's fair to assume that they would be selling a lot more backlinks to a lot more people if they could this gets you involved in the network that you don't want to get into guilt by association. Google's algorithms can easily identify these paid links. If you are dealing with the same network they will count you as a culprit even if you just bought a couple of backlinks. You can also create thousands of backlinks with comment spam but this too is a road to nowhere most backlinks coming from the comments sections are no-follow which means that they don't add any organic value in the first place but they can still get you penalized, additionally spamming the comments sections of other websites can easily piss off their owners who are very happy to report you to Google, so no reward and all risk, Simply not worth it. 

General Directories

And as mentioned earlier general directories are mostly spammy and should be avoided. Again think about it as long as someone is willing to pay their fees, they’ll allow anyone to post that's not much different than having paid links and again these are easily identified by Google.

Irrelevant Websites

Now, backlinks coming from completely irrelevant websites used to be the tier 2 category but after the Google Penguin update, we had to demote these to tier 3. Good backlinks come from good websites and add genuine value to their readers. On the other hand, they link coming from drone-related websites to a divorce lawyer's website doesn't make a lot of sense, no value, and just plain weird. To stay away from backlinks that come from nonrelevant websites no matter how easy it is to acquire that. Google specifically targets websites with too many backlinks from nonrelevant websites. 

Conclusion

So to conclude backlinks are absolutely important. They make your website more credible and authoritative in the eyes of the search engines and propel your web pages higher in the SERPs. However it is vital to pay attention to the types of backlinks in your generated, not everyone will help you, and bad ones we'll get you penalized. Ideally, you should go only after Tier 1 backlinks and avoid Tier 2 and 3.