Not all types of backlinks are created equal. Some push your rankings up. Some do literally nothing. And a few will actively tank your site if you accumulate enough of them. The problem is that most SEO guides lump them all together under “link building” as if a link from the New York Times and a link from a blog comment section carry the same weight. They don’t. Not even close.

This article is a taxonomy. I’m categorizing every common type of backlink, rating each one honestly, and telling you which ones are worth pursuing. I’m not covering how to get them - that’s a separate topic. If you want a broader overview, start with our backlink strategy guide.

Before getting into specific types, you need to understand the fundamental distinction that applies to all of them.

Dofollow links are standard HTML links with no special attributes. They pass link equity - the ranking power that flows from one page to another. When Google crawls a dofollow link, it treats it as an endorsement and factors it into its ranking algorithm.

Nofollow links include a rel="nofollow" attribute that tells search engines not to pass ranking credit. Google introduced this in 2005 to combat comment spam. In 2019, Google changed nofollow to a “hint” rather than a directive - meaning they might choose to follow it anyway. But in practice, nofollow links pass little to no direct ranking value.

There are two additional variants worth knowing:

  • rel="sponsored" - for paid or sponsored links
  • rel="ugc" - for user-generated content like forum posts and comments

Here’s the thing though: nofollow links aren’t worthless. They drive referral traffic, build brand visibility, and contribute to a natural-looking link profile. A site with nothing but dofollow links looks suspicious. Google expects a mix.

With that foundation, let’s rate every common backlink type.

Rating: The gold standard

An editorial backlink is when a writer or journalist links to your content because it’s genuinely useful to their readers. Nobody asked them to. Nobody traded anything. They found your page, thought it added value to their article, and linked to it.

These are almost always dofollow. They come from relevant, authoritative sites. They sit within the body content rather than in a sidebar or footer. Google weights these heavily because they’re the hardest to fake - they represent real editorial judgment.

The catch is you can’t manufacture them directly. You earn them by publishing content worth referencing - original data, definitive guides, free tools. A well-built keyword research tool, for example, naturally attracts editorial links from writers covering that topic.

Guest post backlinks

Rating: Depends entirely on execution

Guest posting gets a bad reputation because people abused it. But there’s a massive difference between writing a thoughtful, expert article for a relevant industry publication and mass-producing 400-word filler pieces for any blog that’ll take them.

A guest post on a high-authority, topically relevant site with a contextual dofollow link? That still moves rankings. A guest post on a random “write for us” site that publishes anything? Google ignores it or worse.

The signal Google looks for: does the guest author appear to be a genuine expert contributing to a real publication? Or is this one of 200 guest posts published this month by different authors who each appear exactly once?

Quality guest posts are effective. Guest post farms are dead.

Resource page backlinks

Rating: Strong when relevant

Resource pages are curated lists of useful links on a specific topic - “Best tools for X,” “Top resources for Y.” When your site gets included on a well-maintained resource page, you get a contextual, usually dofollow link from a page that’s specifically about your topic.

These carry solid weight because the linking page is essentially a curated endorsement. The page exists to recommend things, and your site made the cut. Google sees topical relevance plus editorial selection.

The quality varies. A resource page on a university domain (.edu) or government domain (.gov) linking to your industry guide is excellent. A resource page on a site nobody visits that lists 300 links with no curation is noise.

Rating: Good for authority, mixed for direct ranking impact

When a news outlet covers your company or links to your content in a story, you get a press backlink. Major publications like Forbes, TechCrunch, and industry trade outlets carry enormous domain authority.

The complication: many major publications nofollow external links by default. A mention in the Wall Street Journal might not pass direct link equity. But it absolutely builds brand authority, sends referral traffic, and contributes to your overall backlink profile diversity.

Press backlinks also tend to trigger secondary links. When a major outlet covers something, smaller publications often pick up the story and link to the same source - sometimes with dofollow links.

Rating: Underrated

This is where you find broken links on other sites - links pointing to pages that no longer exist - and offer your content as a replacement. If the site owner swaps in your link, you get a contextual, dofollow backlink from an established page.

These are effective because the page already had a link in that exact spot. You’re not asking someone to add a new link from scratch. You’re fixing a problem they didn’t know they had. The resulting link sits in existing content that may already have its own authority and traffic.

The link quality matches whatever page you’re replacing on. If the broken link was on a high-authority page about your exact topic, you’re inheriting a strong position.

Rating: Mostly neutral, some exceptions

General web directories are irrelevant. Submitting your site to 500 directories does nothing except waste time. Google has been ignoring these since the late 2000s.

But niche, curated directories still have value. A listing in a respected industry directory - your local Chamber of Commerce, a vetted SaaS directory like G2 or Capterra, a professional association - carries some weight. These tend to be nofollow, but they contribute to brand signals and provide a legitimate citation.

The rule: if the directory has actual editorial standards and turns sites away, it might be worth listing in. If it accepts everything, skip it.

Rating: Negligible for rankings, useful for traffic

Links dropped in forum threads - whether that’s Reddit, Quora, niche industry forums, or Stack Overflow - are almost always nofollow or UGC-tagged. They pass minimal direct ranking value.

That said, a well-placed answer on a high-traffic forum thread can drive significant referral traffic. And Google has stated that nofollow is a hint, not a rule. In cases where a forum answer is genuinely useful and heavily upvoted, there’s some evidence that Google may give it partial credit.

The danger zone: dropping links in forums without adding genuine value. This is textbook spam, and forum moderators will remove your posts. If Google sees a pattern of forum spam across your backlink profile, it’s a negative signal.

Rating: No direct ranking value, indirect benefits

Links from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social platforms are nofollow across the board. They don’t pass link equity. Google has said repeatedly that social signals are not a direct ranking factor.

But social links drive content discovery. A widely shared post puts your content in front of people who might link to it from their own sites. The social link itself doesn’t help rankings, but the editorial backlinks it triggers absolutely can.

Think of social links as distribution, not link building.

Rating: Worthless to harmful

Blog comment links are nofollow universally. They’ve been worthless for rankings since roughly 2005, which is exactly why Google created the nofollow attribute in the first place.

At best, a thoughtful comment with a link drives a trickle of referral traffic. At worst, mass comment spam gets your URLs flagged and your domain associated with spammy behavior. There are services that will post thousands of blog comments with your link for $20. This does nothing positive and potentially triggers manual review.

Don’t waste time here.

Rating: Low to negative

Sitewide links in sidebars and footers - the kind where every page on a site links to yours - look unnatural. If a site has 500 pages and every single one links to you from the footer, Google sees that for what it is: a manufactured pattern, not 500 editorial endorsements.

These are common in “designed by” credits on websites and in blogroll sections. They carry minimal positive weight and can look manipulative at scale. A single contextual link within one article on that site would be far more valuable than 500 footer links.

The type matters, but Google also weighs several factors across all types:

Relevance. A link from a site in your industry carries more weight than a link from an unrelated site, regardless of that site’s authority. A pet food blog linking to your SEO tool is worth less than a small but topically relevant marketing blog doing the same.

Anchor text. The clickable text of the link tells Google what the linked page is about. Natural anchor text varies - your brand name, a phrase like “this tool,” the article title, a raw URL. Over-optimized anchor text where every backlink uses your exact target keyword is a spam signal.

Link placement. Links within the main body content carry more weight than links in navigation menus, sidebars, footers, or author bios. The higher up in the content, the better.

Linking domain diversity. Ten links from ten different domains is far more valuable than ten links from the same domain. Google wants to see broad endorsement across the web, not repeated signals from one source.

These factors determine whether a backlink helps increase your domain authority or gets filtered out as noise.

Sites that rank well don’t have one type of backlink. They have a natural distribution across multiple types. A healthy backlink profile typically looks something like this:

  • A core of editorial backlinks from relevant, authoritative sites
  • A handful of quality guest post links from real publications
  • Some resource page inclusions
  • Directory listings from legitimate, curated directories
  • A natural spread of nofollow links from social, forums, and press
  • Varied anchor text that doesn’t look optimized
  • Links accumulating gradually over time, not in suspicious spikes

If your backlink profile is 100% dofollow links with exact-match anchor text, something looks manufactured. If it’s 95% forum and comment links, you don’t have a real link profile. The mix matters.

What to prioritize

Here’s the honest ranking of where to focus your energy:

  1. Editorial backlinks - build content worth linking to
  2. Broken link reclamation - high success rate, strong link quality
  3. Resource page links - targeted and relevant
  4. Quality guest posts - selective, expert contributions only
  5. Press/PR links - good for authority signals even when nofollow
  6. Niche directories - low effort, minor benefit
  7. Everything else - don’t bother for ranking purposes

The types of backlinks that move rankings all share one trait: they’re hard to get at scale. That’s the whole point. If a link type is easy to manufacture by the thousands, Google has already figured out how to discount it. The links that still work are the ones that require genuine value creation or real relationships - which is exactly what makes them effective as a ranking signal.