When link building, it’s important to know what is a good link and what isn’t. While link quality has less of an impact on rankings than link quantity, the links you build do still affect your search engine rankings in positive or negative ways.

If you have bad backlinks pointing at your website, chances are you will get hit by a Google penalty or get hurt by an algorithm update. 

If you link build in the wrong places or to the wrong pages, you’re not going to see many link building benefits at all.

To link build effectively, we need to learn what makes up a good link. There are three major components that go into making up this link.

Domain Authority

Getting backlinks from a site with high domain authority is significant because it can help give your site a boost in the SERPs. It can also show potential customers that your work is trustworthy and worthy of their time and attention.

The most important thing to keep in mind when getting backlinks from sites with high domain authority is to not spam them. You don’t want to send out tons of requests, or use spammy tactics like sending a ton of email messages.

Natural Anchor Text

The link’s anchor text has a lot to do with link authority. Anchor text is the highlighted link text you see on most web pages as shown below:

The link’s anchor text also tells you what the link is about. 

If this link had the anchor text “great article”, it would be less trustworthy and tell you nothing about the content of the link. 

Anchor text can increase or decrease a link’s authority within Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Good Content 

The link’s content has the most to do with link authority (if the link is from a trusted website).  This means link building to a link with good content will be more beneficial than link building with bad content.

It’s a Unique Referring Domain

The term “unique referring domain” is often used to describe a website that links to another site, once. The more unique referring domains you have linking back to your website is more beneficial than having one hundred links from the same website. 

If the site linking back to your site is new to your backlink profile, it will increase your link authority and trust score.