Backlink Examples That Show What Good Link Building Looks Like

A backlink is a hyperlink from one website pointing to another. In SEO terms, it functions as a vote of confidence, signalling to search engines that the linked page has enough credibility or relevance to be worth referencing. Not all backlinks carry equal weight, and the difference between a link that moves rankings and one that does nothing often comes down to context, authority, and intent.

Understanding what a strong backlink looks like in practice is more useful than reading abstract definitions. Seeing real-world examples across different link types helps you develop an eye for what to pursue, what to ignore, and what might actively harm your site.

What Makes a Backlink Worth Having?

Before looking at specific examples, it helps to understand the criteria that separate useful backlinks from noise. The SEO industry spent years obsessing over quantity, and that obsession created a cottage industry of link schemes, private blog networks, and bulk directory submissions. Most of that activity is either worthless or actively counterproductive today.

The signals that actually matter are relevance, authority, placement, and anchor text. Relevance means the linking page covers a topic related to yours. A food blog linking to a restaurant equipment supplier makes sense. The same food blog linking to a commercial roofing company does not, regardless of how high the domain authority reads in your tool of choice. Authority reflects the credibility of the linking domain, built over time through its own backlink profile, traffic, and editorial standards. Placement matters because a link embedded naturally within the body of an article carries more weight than one sitting in a footer template that appears across thousands of pages. And anchor text, the visible clickable words, tells search engines something about what the linked page is about, though over-engineering this signal tends to backfire.

When I was running an agency and we were building out SEO programmes for clients, one of the first things I would ask the team was whether we were pursuing links because they were genuinely good or because they were easy. Easy links are rarely good links. Good links are rarely easy. That tension is worth sitting with before you build any outreach strategy.

If you want the broader context for how backlinks fit into a complete SEO programme, the Complete SEO Strategy hub on The Marketing Juice covers positioning, on-page signals, technical foundations, and content strategy alongside link building.

Editorial Backlinks: The Standard Worth Chasing

An editorial backlink is one that a writer or editor includes because the linked content genuinely adds value to their piece. No payment, no reciprocal arrangement, no templated outreach that resulted in a favour. The link exists because someone decided their readers would benefit from seeing it.

A practical example: a senior writer at a business publication covers a story about retail technology adoption. In the piece, they reference a report published by a retail analytics firm and link to it. That link was not requested. It appeared because the report was credible, specific, and directly relevant to the argument the writer was making. The analytics firm did not build that link. They built the report, and the link followed.

This is the model that scales. When you consistently produce content that contains original data, sharp analysis, or a perspective that is genuinely harder to find elsewhere, you create the conditions for editorial links. The content becomes a reference point. Writers and researchers find it, use it, and cite it.

The challenge is that this approach requires patience and investment. It is easier to pitch a guest post or buy a placement. But editorial links from credible publications are the ones that move rankings in competitive spaces, and they are also the ones that are hardest to replicate artificially. That asymmetry is why they matter.

Guest Post Backlinks: Useful When Done With Discipline

Guest posting has a complicated reputation in SEO, and not without reason. At its worst, it became a link exchange disguised as content contribution. Agencies would place generic articles on low-quality blogs that existed purely to host sponsored content, insert keyword-stuffed anchor text links, and call it link building. Google has been explicit that this type of activity violates its guidelines.

At its best, guest posting is a legitimate way to build authority in your industry. The distinction is intent and quality. If you are writing a substantive article for a publication that has genuine readership, editorial standards, and topical relevance to your business, a link back to your site is a reasonable byproduct of that contribution. If you are writing 400 words of filler for a site that exists to host outbound links, you are wasting time and potentially creating a liability.

A concrete example of a good guest post backlink: a B2B software company’s head of product writes a detailed piece on workflow automation for a respected operations management publication. The article draws on real implementation experience and is genuinely useful to that publication’s readership. The author bio includes a link to the company’s site. That link is relevant, contextual, and earned through the quality of the contribution. It will likely carry more weight than ten links from sites that accepted the same article with minimal editorial review.

One thing I learned from years of managing SEO programmes across dozens of clients: the sites that were most reluctant to publish your content were often the most valuable. If a publication has editorial standards that make it hard to get placed, that difficulty is the signal. It means the link is worth something.

Resource Page Backlinks: Straightforward and Often Overlooked

Many websites maintain resource pages, curated lists of useful tools, guides, or references for their audience. These exist across industries, from academic institutions linking to research databases to professional associations listing industry reports. A backlink from a resource page on a relevant, authoritative site is one of the cleaner link types to pursue because the intent is transparent and the placement is natural.

The approach is straightforward. You identify resource pages in your niche that already link to content similar to yours. You assess whether your content is genuinely a better or complementary resource. If it is, you contact the site owner or editor with a specific, concise pitch explaining why your content belongs on that page.

What makes this work is having something worth linking to. A comprehensive guide, a free tool, an original dataset, a glossary that is genuinely more useful than what is already out there. Resource page outreach built around thin or derivative content rarely converts, and when it does, the link tends to sit on a page that carries little authority itself.

Government and educational resource pages are particularly valuable when accessible, and Crazy Egg has a useful breakdown of how .gov backlinks work and why they carry authority. The barrier to earning these is higher, which is precisely why they are worth understanding.

Broken Link Building: Finding Opportunity in Other People’s Problems

Broken link building is a tactic that works on a simple premise. Websites link to external content that eventually disappears, moves, or goes offline. Those broken links are a problem for the site owner because they create a poor user experience and signal that the page is not being maintained. If you have content that could replace the broken link, you have a reason to reach out.

The process involves identifying pages in your niche that contain outbound links, checking those links for 404 errors, and then contacting the page owner to flag the broken link and suggest your content as a replacement. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush make this process manageable at scale.

A practical example: a marketing blog links to an agency’s article on paid social benchmarks. That agency has since closed and the article no longer exists. You have a more recent benchmarks report on your site. You contact the blog editor, flag the dead link, and point to your report as a current alternative. If your content is genuinely useful and relevant, the conversion rate on this type of outreach tends to be higher than cold pitches because you are solving a problem the site owner already has.

The limitation is that this is a labour-intensive tactic. It works best when it is part of a broader link building programme rather than the primary strategy. And as with everything in link building, the quality of the replacement content determines whether the link is worth having.

Competitor Backlink Analysis: Learning From What Already Works

One of the most commercially sensible approaches to link building is studying where your competitors are getting their links. If a site is willing to link to a competitor in your space, there is a reasonable chance they would link to you if your content is comparable or better. This is not a shortcut. It is just applied intelligence.

When I was growing an agency’s SEO capability, we would routinely pull competitor backlink profiles before scoping any link building programme. Not to copy the strategy wholesale, but to understand the landscape. Which publications covered this industry? Which resource pages existed? Which types of content were attracting links? The answers shaped where we invested time and effort.

SEMrush has a detailed walkthrough of how to analyse competitor backlinks that covers the mechanics well. The strategic layer on top of that analysis is asking why certain links exist, not just where they are. A competitor might have earned a link from a major trade publication because they released original research. The lesson is not to contact that publication cold. It is to produce original research of your own.

Competitor analysis also reveals gaps. If your three main competitors all have links from a particular industry association’s website and you do not, that is a specific opportunity worth investigating. If none of them have links from a certain category of publication, that might indicate a gap in the market or a category that simply does not link out in that space.

Anchor Text Examples: What Natural Looks Like

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It is a signal to search engines about the topic of the linked page, but it is a signal that has been heavily manipulated over the years and one that Google now reads with considerable scepticism when it looks too engineered.

A natural backlink profile contains a mix of anchor text types. Some links use the brand name. Some use the URL. Some use generic phrases like “this article” or “here”. Some use partial keyword phrases. A smaller proportion use exact-match keywords. When a site’s backlink profile shows that 80% of its inbound links use the same exact-match keyword as anchor text, that pattern looks manufactured because it is.

Search Engine Journal covers the risks of over-optimising anchor text and why repetitive exact-match anchors are a pattern worth avoiding. The practical takeaway is that when you are doing outreach, you should not be dictating anchor text to publishers. If a site wants to link to you, let them choose how to describe the link. The resulting diversity will serve you better than a uniform keyword string.

Examples of anchor text from a healthy, natural-looking backlink profile might include: the brand name, a descriptive phrase like “their guide to content strategy”, a partial match like “content marketing advice”, a URL in plain text, or a generic phrase like “this resource”. None of these look like they were placed by an SEO team following a template. That is the point.

Backlinks in the Context of AI Search: What Is Changing

The SEO landscape has shifted meaningfully with the growth of AI-generated search results and large language model-based answers. The question of whether backlinks remain relevant in this environment is a legitimate one, and the honest answer is that the picture is still developing.

What appears to be consistent is that backlinks remain a proxy for credibility. When an AI search system is deciding which sources to surface or cite, the authority signals it draws on include the same signals that traditional search has used for years. A page with a strong backlink profile from relevant, credible sources is more likely to be treated as a trustworthy reference. SEMrush has published analysis on how backlinks relate to visibility in AI search results, and the findings suggest that link authority continues to matter even as the format of results changes.

There is also a broader point here that I think gets lost in the tactical discussion. Backlinks are not just an SEO mechanism. They are a signal of genuine credibility in your field. If credible sources in your industry are citing your content, that means something beyond rankings. It means your content is useful enough that people with audiences of their own are pointing their readers toward it. That is a commercially meaningful outcome regardless of what the algorithm does next.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, and one of the things that stuck with me was how consistently the winning entries were built on something real. A genuine product advantage, a real insight about the audience, a creative idea that solved a business problem. The work that won was not trying to game the judges. It was just better. Link building works the same way. The content that earns links consistently is not built around link acquisition. It is built around being genuinely useful.

What Bad Backlink Examples Look Like

It is worth being explicit about what poor-quality backlinks look like in practice, because the industry is still full of services selling link packages that will do more harm than good.

A link from a private blog network is a backlink from a site that exists solely to pass link equity. These sites typically have thin content, no real audience, and a footprint that experienced SEOs can identify. Google has been penalising these networks for years and continues to do so. If a service is offering you 50 links for a fixed monthly fee with guaranteed placements, the links are almost certainly coming from this type of infrastructure.

A link from an irrelevant directory is another example of a backlink that adds no value. Generic business directories that accept any submission without editorial review carry no authority and signal nothing meaningful about your site’s credibility. There are exceptions, particularly niche industry directories with genuine curation, but the bulk submission services that populate dozens of generic directories simultaneously are a waste of budget.

Forum signature links, comment spam, and links embedded in widgets that get installed across thousands of sites are all patterns Google has learned to discount or penalise. The common thread is that none of these represent a genuine editorial decision to reference your content. They are manufactured signals, and manufactured signals degrade over time as search engines get better at identifying them.

I have seen clients come to agencies with backlink profiles that looked impressive on paper, hundreds of referring domains, reasonable domain authority scores in the tools, and rankings that were inexplicably flat. When you dug into the link profile, it was clear that a previous agency had been buying links. The volume was there. The quality was not. Cleaning up that kind of profile takes longer and costs more than building a clean one from scratch.

For a broader look at how backlinks work and what distinguishes useful links from harmful ones, Crazy Egg has a clear overview of the fundamentals worth reading if you are approaching this topic for the first time.

How to Evaluate a Backlink Opportunity Before You Pursue It

When an outreach opportunity presents itself, whether inbound or outbound, a quick evaluation framework helps you avoid wasting time on links that will not move the needle.

Start with relevance. Does the linking page cover a topic related to your business or the specific page you want to rank? If the topical connection is weak, the link will carry less weight regardless of the domain’s overall authority. Relevance at the page level matters more than relevance at the domain level.

Then look at the quality of the linking domain. Does it have real traffic? Does it have editorial standards? Is the content on the site produced by people with genuine expertise in the subject? Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush give you authority scores, but those scores are a proxy, not a verdict. A site with modest domain authority but a real, engaged audience in your niche is often more valuable than a high-authority generalist site where your link will sit in a piece with no topical relevance.

Check where the link will be placed. A link in the body of a relevant article is worth more than a link in the footer, sidebar, or a list of sponsors. Editorial placement within content that is genuinely about your topic is the standard to aim for.

Finally, consider the cost. Not just financial cost, but the cost in time, content production, and relationship capital. Some link opportunities require significant investment to pursue. That investment is only justified if the expected return, in terms of ranking improvement, referral traffic, or brand credibility, is proportionate. Treating link building as a business investment rather than an SEO checkbox tends to produce better decisions.

The Ahrefs 2025 webinar on backlinks and mentions covers how the evaluation criteria for links are evolving, and it is worth an hour of your time if you manage SEO programmes at any meaningful scale.

Link building does not sit in isolation. If you are building a serious SEO programme, the Complete SEO Strategy hub connects backlink strategy to the technical, content, and positioning work that determines whether those links actually translate into commercial outcomes.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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