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Not all backlinks are equal. Some move the needle overnight, others do nothing, and a few will tank your rankings. Here's every type ranked from best to avoid.
I used to think a backlink was a backlink. Get enough of them and rankings go up. Simple math.
Then I watched a client's site tank after buying 200 "high DA" links from a Fiverr seller. Meanwhile another client got three links from industry publications and jumped two pages in rankings within a month. Same keyword. Same niche.
The difference wasn't quantity. It was type.
There are something like fifteen different types of backlinks that people talk about in SEO, and I have opinions about most of them. Some are genuinely great. A bunch do basically nothing. A few will actively wreck your site. I'm going to go through all of them but I'm not going to pretend they all deserve equal attention, because they don't.
The backlinks that actually matter
I'm putting these first because honestly you could stop reading after this section and be fine. Everything below this is either supporting cast or stuff to avoid.
Editorial backlinks
Someone links to you because they wanted to. No pitch, no payment, no arrangement. A journalist or blogger found your content and decided it was worth referencing. That's it.
You can't manufacture these. I know people try. I've tried. I once spent three weeks building out a data study on SaaS churn benchmarks. Surveyed like 40 companies, cleaned the data, made nice charts, the whole thing. Nobody cared. Not a single link. Then a month later I wrote this half-baked opinion piece about why most SEO audits are a waste of money and some editor at a tech publication linked to it in a roundup. That post took me maybe two hours.
I'm still kind of annoyed about it.
Point is, you create stuff that's interesting or useful or provocative and sometimes people link to it. There's no reliable formula. The original PageRank paper was basically about this - the whole algorithm was designed to reward pages that other pages voluntarily cited. A single editorial link from a major publication can move you from page two to the top five. I've seen it happen with my own rankings.
Contextual backlinks from authoritative sources
This is the type I think about most. A link that sits inside the body of relevant content on a trusted site. Wikipedia references, Reddit discussions where someone links to your guide because it actually answers the question, Hacker News threads, established blogs in your space. The link is surrounded by words that relate to your topic. It makes sense in context. It's not shoved into a sidebar widget or a footer nobody reads.
Google clearly cares about this combination of context and authority. I've watched a DA 60 link from a niche-relevant page outperform a DA 90 link from some random unrelated site, repeatedly. It's not even close when the topical match is strong.
This is what Revised does, by the way. We find contextual backlinks from authoritative sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, and major publications. The links sit within relevant content pointing back to your site. No outreach emails. No guest posting treadmill.
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Resource page backlinks
Universities and government organizations maintain these curated link lists around specific topics. If you can get on one, the link tends to stick around forever. I have links from .edu resource pages that have been live for four years. Never once had to follow up or re-pitch.
The problem is getting on them in the first place. I typically search "useful resources" + [topic] or site:.edu "helpful links" and send pitches. Response rate is abysmal. Like 3% on a good week. But .edu and .gov links carry weight that's hard to get any other way, so I keep doing it.
Guest posting (the real kind, not the spam kind)
I need to be specific here because "guest posting" means two completely different things depending on who you talk to.
There's the version where you write a genuine 2,000-word piece for a respected publication in your niche and include one natural link. That works. Google is fine with it. Then there's the version where you pay someone on Upwork to crank out 500-word posts for random blogs and stuff exact-match anchor text into the author bio. Google's link spam policies specifically call out large-scale guest posting campaigns as manipulation. They're not subtle about it.
The irony is that the spammy version is way easier and cheaper, which is why so many people default to it and then wonder why it didn't work. Or worse, why they got penalized.
Niche edits
Your link gets added to an existing page that already ranks and has authority. Different from guest posting because the page has history - Google already trusts it. Authority transfer is faster.
I talked to an agency owner last year who told me he'd stopped offering niche edits completely. Too many providers had turned it into a joke. His clients kept getting links placed next to paragraphs about completely unrelated topics. One of them got a link about their accounting software inserted into a paragraph about dog training. I'm not making that up. The "niche" part of niche edit apparently means nothing to half the people selling them.
When done properly on relevant, authoritative pages, these are great. But the market for them has gotten so polluted that I'm hesitant to recommend anyone buy them without doing serious due diligence on the provider first.
The supporting cast
These are fine. They won't transform anything on their own, but they fill out a natural-looking backlink profile and some of them have side benefits.
Broken link building
Find dead links on other sites, create content that replaces what the dead page used to offer, email the site owner suggesting the swap. Response rate is genuinely good compared to cold outreach - I've gotten 10-15% versus the usual 2-3% when you're just asking strangers to link to you for no particular reason.
We have a full guide on link reclamation if you want the process. The main thing is to be selective about which broken links you chase. A dead link on a DA 10 personal blog isn't worth the email. A dead link on a DA 70 industry publication is worth dropping everything for.
Digital PR
Create something newsworthy, pitch journalists, hope they cover it and link to you. A Moz study found that links from high-authority news sites pass serious ranking power. One DR 80+ news link can outperform dozens of smaller ones.
I should be more honest about my experience with this though. I ran a digital PR campaign for a client last year. Two months. Roughly 80 pitches sent. Four responses total. Two became links. Both were excellent links, no question. But if I calculated my hourly rate on that work it would be depressing. The ROI is there if you zoom out far enough, but you have to be the kind of person who can send 40 emails and get zero responses and keep going. I am apparently not that person, at least not consistently.
HARO and journalist queries
Services like Qwoted, Featured, and what used to be Help a Reporter Out (now Connectively) let you respond to journalist queries and potentially get quoted with a backlink.
Speed matters more than quality here. Journalists are on deadline. They go with whoever responds first with something decent. I set up keyword alerts and tried to reply within 30 minutes. Still got beat out half the time. The links you do land are real editorial mentions on real news sites though, which is hard to replicate through any other channel unless you're already well-known or you're paying a PR agency.
Wikipedia backlinks
Every Wikipedia link is nofollow. Google doesn't pass PageRank through them. So on paper they're worthless.
Except Wikipedia is probably the single most-cited source in AI search results. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews - they all lean on Wikipedia heavily. If your site shows up as a reference on a Wikipedia article, AI systems are more likely to surface you too. That indirect value is real even though the direct SEO benefit isn't. We wrote a whole guide on how to get backlinks from Wikipedia if you want to go down that rabbit hole. Fair warning: Wikipedia editors do not mess around.
Directory listings
Google Business Profile, Yelp, industry-specific directories. Keep your name, address, and phone number identical across all of them. I once spent an entire afternoon fixing a client's listings because half said "Suite 4" and the other said "Ste 4" and apparently that was enough to confuse Google. If you're doing local SEO these are non-negotiable. For everyone else, set up the big five or ten and move on with your life.
The ones that barely matter
Oh wait, I should mention something before I blow past this section. I'm going to lump a few of these together because giving each one its own writeup would imply they deserve individual strategic attention. They don't.
Social media links, forum links, infographic links - none of these are going to change your life. Social links from Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Reddit are almost all nofollow and don't pass ranking power. Their only real value is as discovery mechanisms. A viral Reddit thread can drive traffic and sometimes a journalist sees it and gives you a real link. But that's a happy accident, not a strategy. Forum links from Quora, Stack Overflow, niche communities are similar. Mostly nofollow, occasionally send referral traffic. The test I use: would you post this even without the link? If yes, fine, include it. If you're only there for the backlink, moderators will sniff it out and ban you. I've watched it happen to people.
Infographic links were huge in like 2013. Everyone was making infographics. The novelty is completely gone and the link usually goes to the image source rather than your target page anyway. Better for brand awareness than rankings at this point.
And press releases - look, I wasted $400 on a press release distribution early in my career. Got links on 50+ news aggregator sites. Felt amazing for about a week. None of them did anything measurable. Google treats syndicated press release links as self-distributed content, which is exactly what they are. Good for getting announcements indexed quickly. Useless for rankings.
Stay away from PBNs
I'm giving this its own section because I want to be really clear.
A PBN is a private blog network. Someone registers a bunch of expired domains, throws up thin WordPress sites, and sells links from them. The links point to your site from what looks like a bunch of different domains with decent metrics. On a spreadsheet it looks incredible.
I know a guy - used to work with him actually - who built his agency's entire reputation on PBN links. Charged clients $500 per link, had a network of maybe 300 domains. For about two years it worked. Clients were happy. Rankings went up. He was making good money and he honestly believed he was providing real value.
Then Google rolled out the March 2024 spam update. It specifically targeted expired domain abuse and link networks. Overnight, not gradually. Three of his biggest clients lost 60-80% of their organic traffic within two weeks. One of them was an ecommerce store doing like $200k/month from organic search. He told me the client called him screaming at 6 AM on a Saturday. He refunded everyone, shut down the PBN, and pivoted to content marketing. But the clients' sites took months to recover even after disavowing all the PBN links. One of them never fully recovered. The domain was just too damaged.
If someone is selling you "high DA backlinks" for $50-100 each, they're PBN links. The metrics look great because the expired domains had real authority before someone bought them and turned them into link farms. But Google has gotten scarily good at identifying these networks. I genuinely believe the risk-reward calculation on PBNs flipped sometime in 2023 and now there's almost no scenario where the risk is worth it.
Dofollow vs nofollow
Quick thing on link attributes because people ask about this constantly.
Dofollow links pass PageRank - they're the default when there's no special attribute on a link. Nofollow (rel="nofollow") tells Google not to pass ranking credit. Wikipedia and social media use these. There's also rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content like forum posts.
Since 2019 though, Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a hard rule. They might follow it anyway. So the old thinking of "dofollow is everything, nofollow is worthless" is outdated. A natural profile has a mix. Something like 60-70% dofollow and 30-40% nofollow. Funny enough, a profile that's 100% dofollow actually looks suspicious to Google, because real websites naturally accumulate nofollow links from social shares and forums and Wikipedia and whatever else.
What matters more than the type
I've been doing this long enough that I think the type of backlink matters less than people assume. What matters more:
Relevance. I will die on this hill. A DA 30 link from a site in your exact niche beats a DA 70 link from some random unrelated domain. I see people chasing high-DA links from sites that have nothing to do with their business and it drives me nuts. A link from a cooking blog to your cybersecurity tool doesn't help you. Google understands topical relationships.
Page-level authority, not just domain authority. A link from a page that itself ranks well and has its own backlinks passes more value than a link from a brand new page on a DA 90 domain. Most people look at domain metrics only and miss this completely.
Anchor text variation. Too many exact-match anchors and Google thinks you're gaming the system. You want a natural mix of branded anchors, naked URLs, and phrases that sound like a human wrote them. Because ideally a human did write them.
Where the link sits on the page. Footer links, sidebar links, they pass less value. Links in the main body content, surrounded by relevant text, pass the most.
How fast you're building. 500 links overnight is a red flag even if every single one is legitimate. 5-10 per month looks like natural growth. I've seen sites get penalized for building too quickly even when the links themselves were perfectly fine. Google watches the pace.
So what should you actually do
Depends on where you are. If you're just starting, get your directory listings set up, write a few genuine guest posts, and use a backlink checker to see what your competitors have. Reverse-engineer what's working instead of guessing.
If you're past the early stage and growing, start doing broken link building and digital PR. Look into resource page outreach. This is where most people plateau because they keep doing beginner tactics instead of graduating to harder stuff that pays off more.
If you're already established and have real authority, the biggest wins come from editorial links and contextual placements from authoritative sources. That's what Revised does. We find high-authority contextual backlinks from Wikipedia, Reddit, major publications. No outreach grind on your end. Browse the marketplace if you want to see what's available for your niche.
The pattern I keep seeing with sites that do well over time is boring. They build good links consistently, they don't chase shortcuts, they don't panic when a competitor jumps ahead for a month. Quality compounds. The sites that buy PBN links or spam guest posts might jump ahead temporarily but they always come back down. Always. I've watched it play out maybe a dozen times now and the ending is always the same.
Start with understanding how backlinks work, look at what you already have, figure out where the gaps are. Our knowledge base covers the fundamentals if you want to go deeper on any of this.
