--- title: 'What makes a backlink "Good"? - 3.3. SEO Course by Ahrefs' source: 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1Bc3JsTSA' video_id: 'Yf1Bc3JsTSA' date: 2026-10-03 duration_sec: 490 channel: 'Ahrefs' --- # What makes a backlink "Good"? - 3.3. SEO Course by Ahrefs > Source: [What makes a backlink "Good"? - 3.3. SEO Course by Ahrefs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1Bc3JsTSA) ## Summary This lesson from Sammo's link building module explains the five attributes that determine backlink quality: relevance, authoritativeness, anchor text, rel attributes, and placement. It emphasizes that not all links are equal and provides practical examples to illustrate each point. ### Key Points - **Backlinks aren't all equal** [00:13] — Not all backlinks are equal; spammy forum links shouldn't hold as much weight as a link from the New York Times. - **Relevance matters** [00:40] — Links from topically relevant sites (e.g., travel sites for travel content) hold more weight than links from unrelated sites. - **Authoritativeness and PageRank** [02:26] — Authority represents the 'link power' a page has, based on PageRank. High-authority pages pass more authority. - **DR and UR metrics** [03:36] — Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR) for website authority and URL Rating (UR) for page-level authority. - **Anatomy of a link** [04:11] — The three SEO-relevant parts of a link are the destination URL, anchor text, and rel attribute. - **Anchor text and over-optimization** [04:28] — Google uses anchor text to understand page topics, but over-optimizing with keyword-rich anchors can look unnatural and trigger penalties. - **Rel attributes explained** [05:58] — The three rel values are nofollow, UGC, and sponsored. Google treats them as hints, not hard rules. - **Followed vs nofollow** [06:42] — Followed links can pass PageRank and boost rankings; nofollow and UGC links aren't bad but don't pass authority. - **Link placement** [07:06] — Prominent links (e.g., editorial) are more likely to be clicked and may pass more authority than footer links. ### Conclusion High-quality backlinks are defined by relevance, authority, anchor text, rel attributes, and placement. Focus on building links that meet these criteria to improve your rankings. ## Transcript Hey, it's Sammo, and welcome to the third lesson in the link building module. Today we're going to talk about the attributes that make a backlink good or high quality. As I said in the last lesson, not all backlinks are created equal. For example, if you spam forums with links to your site, those wouldn't and shouldn't hold more weight than, let's say, a link from the New York Times. Otherwise, backlinks would just be a game of quantity, and Google search results would reward the biggest spammers. Fortunately, ranking on Google doesn't work that way, and quality backlinks are still a prominent ranking signal. So with that said, let's talk about the five attributes that make a backlink good. The first attribute is relevance. Imagine this for a second. You're going to visit Greece for the first time next month, and you need recommendations for places worth going to. Now, you have a friend that lived in Greece for their entire life and obviously knows every nook and cranny. You also have a friend in the U.S. who hates traveling and has never been outside of the States. Whose opinion would you hold higher? Obviously your Greek friend. In the same way, links from a website about travel or Greece would hold more weight than links from sites about technology or marketing because they're more topically relevant and authoritative. For example, you'll see that this page is ranking number one for the query, how to devane shrimp. If we look at their backlinks, and also filter by one link per domain, we can see their backlinks from different websites. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, then you can still see backlinks pointing at pages using our free Backlinks Checker tool, which I'll leave a link to in the description. Going back to the backlinks report, you'll see this page from Wikihow, which is called 3 Ways to Peel and De-Bane Shrimp, so the link is on a very relevant page. Scrolling down a bit, you'll see this link from a page called Shrimps with Garlic Sauce, which again is relevant at the page level. But you can also see that it relevant at the domain level too just by looking at the domain name slimpalette Both of these links are great from a relevance standpoint whereas a link like this one isn very relevant at all The page is about Firefox 3.5, which is a web browser. It comes from a site about video games and computer hardware. So an ideal link would be contextually placed within the body of the content where someone is quite literally recommending or referencing you. Alright, the next quality of good quality links is authoritativeness. If you're unfamiliar with authority in the context of backlinks, it basically represents the so-called link power a web page has, and this relates to how Google PageRank works. As we discussed before, both the quantity and quality of links matter. So the more quality links a page gets, the more page rank it earns. And the more page rank it has, the more authority it can pass to other pages through hyperlinks. For example, let's say that page C has two links, one from page A and one from page B. Page A is stronger than page B and also has fewer outgoing links. Feed this information into the PageRank algorithm and you get the PageRank of page C. Now this is obviously a simplified version of how PageRank works, but the key point here is that getting links from high authority pages will likely have the greatest impact on your rankings. Now while Google doesn't provide PageRank or website authority scores, we have two metrics at Ahrefs that try to quantify it. Domain rating is our website authority metric, and it represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile. And URL rating is our page level authority metric, which represents the overall strength of a page's backlink profile. And you'll find both of these metrics throughout most of our tools, giving you insights on referring pages. Now, we covered two very important parts of good quality backlinks but what we haven't talked about yet is the actual link itself so let break down the anatomy of a hyperlink and talk about how the different parts relate to SEO here what a link looks like to your website visitors And if we look at the HTML code then it would look like this Now there are three basic parts to a link that matter in SEO. The destination URL, anchor text, and the rel attribute or lack of one. The destination URL is simply the URL the person will visit when the link is clicked. The second part of a link is the anchor text. The anchor text is a clickable word, phrase, or image attached to the link. So in our example, Site Explorer is the anchor text, which is the name of our competitor analysis tool. Google uses anchor text to better understand what a page is about and what terms it should rank for. But building lots of links with keyword-rich anchors is an example of a link scheme and may result in a Google penalty as it looks unnatural. For example, if you had a post on the best golf balls and had a hundred links pointing to it where the anchor text were all best golf balls, then it would look and be quite unnatural. People often use anchors such as the company's brand name, the title of the page, the URL, or phrases like click here. And here's some proof. If we look at the anchors or backlinks pointing to our data study on featured snippets, you'll see varying anchor text like Ahrefs, old studies, Ahrefs study, research, and even specific stats like 12.3% of search queries and 99.58% and so on. In fact, there are only 16 websites that have linked to us using the anchor text featured snippet. With most earned links, you have very little or no control over the anchor text, so over-optimization isn't something you really need to worry about. And the last part of the link we'll talk about is the rel attribute. Some links contain a rel attribute which is intended to tell crawlers about the relationship between the linking page and the linked page. And the three rel values that you should know about when it comes to link building are nofollow UGC and sponsored Historically nofollow links told Google that the linking page would rather not associate themselves with the linked page and for that reason Google didn transfer authority through those links. But then, Google added a couple other REL values, UGC, which stands for User Generated Content, and Sponsored, which signifies an ethical paid link. They also announced that going forward, they would look at these link attributes as hints, meaning they may pass value through them at their discretion. Now, if a link doesn't have any of these rel values, then it will be called a followed link, meaning the link can pass page rank and help boost your rankings. Seeing as this is still relatively new, I'd recommend focusing on building followed links, although that's only partially within your control. Now, it's important to note that no follow in UGC links aren't bad. It's just that followed links are proven to pass authority. One final thing I want to touch on is link placement. Prominent links are more likely to be clicked, and it's believed that Google takes this into account when determining how much authority a link transfers. For instance, an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer. So all else being equal, the former will be better than the latter. So to summarize, an ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the link is followed. It would have a descriptive anchor and be placed contextually within editorial content. But the truth is, a lot of this is out of your control. What is in your control is how you spend your time building links. By using these five attributes to help qualify prospects or people that are worth contacting, you'll spend your time building links that will actually move the needle. Now, the easiest way for a beginner to start building links is to use tried and tested tactics. And we'll be covering a few of them in the next lesson, which will be published tomorrow. So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on that lesson. And if you're watching this video at a later time, then check the description because all of the links to the course will be updated there. I'll see you in the link building tactics lesson.