20 Types of Backlinks in SEO and Which Ones to Build (2026)

A link from a TechCrunch article and a link from a forum signature are both backlinks. One can move a page onto page one. The other gets ignored, and at scale it can get your whole link profile discounted.

Most lists of the types of backlinks throw 30 at you without saying which ones deserve your time. This one sorts 20 types by what they're worth and how risky they are, then tells you where to spend. If you want the tactics for getting each one, our link building guide covers those step by step.

What Are the Types of Backlinks?

The types of backlinks fall into three groupings. By attribute: dofollow, nofollow, sponsored or UGC. By placement: in the body text, an image, a bio, a footer or a sidebar. And by source, meaning how you earned the link. The 20 types below are sorted by source, because that's what you actually choose.

Every link has all three properties at once. A guest post link is a source type, it's usually dofollow, and it can sit in the body or in an author bio. The table gives each source type a rough score so you can compare them before reading the details.

Backlink Types by Link Attribute

The rel attribute on a link tells Google whether to count it as a vote. A plain link with no attribute is called dofollow and passes ranking value. Nofollow, sponsored and ugc links usually pass none, although Google has treated all three as hints rather than rules since March 2020.

Google explained the hint model when it announced the sponsored and ugc attributes in September 2019. In practice, count only dofollow links when you're forecasting ranking impact. Our guide to link equity explains exactly how much value each attribute and redirect type passes.

Backlink Types by Placement on the Page

Where a link sits changes what it's worth. A contextual link in the body of an article gets the most weight because readers are most likely to click it. Links in author bios, sidebars and footers get less, and sitewide footer links repeated on every page count for very little.

Image links sit in between. They pass value like a text link, and Google reads the alt text as the anchor. Google's spam policies specifically call out "widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites" as link spam, so a footer credit on 400 client sites is a liability rather than 400 backlinks.

Backlink Types Worth Building in 2026

Seven types belong in the Build group: they pass real ranking value, carry little risk and come from sites that chose to link. They take more effort per link than anything in the Avoid group. That effort is exactly why they still work: competitors can't buy their way into the same placements.

Editorial links

An editorial link is one a writer adds because your page is the best source for a point they're making. Nobody asked, nobody paid. These carry the most weight because they're the thing PageRank was built to measure, and they're the hardest for a competitor to copy.

You earn them with original data, strong opinions and pages that answer a question better than anything else ranking. You can also prompt them: send a journalist a stat before their deadline, and the link that follows is still editorial.

Listicle mentions

A listicle mention is a spot in a "best X tools" article that ranks for a buying keyword. For SaaS companies it's often the most valuable link type available, because the page already ranks, readers are comparing products, and in our tracking AI assistants cite these lists more than any other page type. Our listicle placement service exists because this one type outperforms most others for B2B software.

To find them, search your category's buying keywords ("best CRM for startups", "Asana alternatives") and list every article in the top 20. Pitch the author with something that earns the spot: a free account for testing, a feature the list is missing or updated pricing. Lists get refreshed every 6 to 12 months, so a no today can become a yes at the next update.

Digital PR links

Digital PR links come from news coverage of something you published, like a survey, a data study or an expert comment. In our experience, one story picked up by five outlets can land more authority in a week than months of outreach. The catch is that most pitches get ignored, so budget for several attempts before one lands.

The formats that get picked up are surveys with at least 200 respondents, pricing or salary indexes and data only you have from your product. Journalist request platforms like Qwoted and Featured also still work for expert quotes, though reply rates have dropped as AI-written pitches flood them.

Integration and partner pages

If your product integrates with Slack, HubSpot or Zapier, those companies usually list partners on a directory page. The listing often includes a followed link from a very strong domain. It's the easiest high-authority link most SaaS companies aren't claiming, and it takes an email to the partner team.

Check the Zapier app directory, the HubSpot App Marketplace, the Slack App Directory and the partner pages of every tool you integrate with. Some of these listings are nofollow, so open the page source before you count them. Even the nofollow ones send qualified traffic, because the people browsing already use the partner's product.

Resource page links

Many sites keep curated pages of tools, templates or guides on a topic. If your page genuinely belongs on one, a short, specific email is often enough. These links are small individually but low risk and very relevant, because the page exists to point readers elsewhere.

Search Google for your topic plus "useful resources" or "recommended tools", or use intitle:resources with your keyword. Skip pages with 200 links on them; the share each link gets is tiny, and pages like that often haven't been updated in years.

Broken link replacements

When a page links to something that now returns a 404, you can offer your page as the replacement. You're fixing a problem for the site owner, which is why reply rates beat cold link requests. Ahrefs' Broken Backlinks report finds these in a few minutes.

Run a competitor's domain through the report, filter for dead pages that had strong links, and check whether you have (or can build) something that covers the same ground. Then email each linking site with the broken URL and your replacement. Keep it to four sentences.

Reclaimed brand mentions

Sometimes a site names your product without linking to it. Asking them to add the link is the warmest outreach there is, since they already chose to write about you. Our guide to unlinked brand mentions walks through finding and converting them at scale.

Backlink Types to Vet Before You Pay

Five types sit in the Vet hard group: they can pass strong ranking value, but only on real sites with real readers. Done cheaply, each one drifts into link-scheme territory. The same tactic can be a solid link or a wasted invoice depending entirely on the site.

Guest posts

A guest post is an article you write for another site, with a link back to you. On a publication with editorial standards and an audience, it's a strong link. On a site that publishes anything with a fee attached, it's worthless. Google's spam policies also flag "optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases," so keep anchors natural. Our guide to guest posting for SEO covers how to plan a guest post that ranks on its own.

Before you pitch, check four things. The site should get at least 1,000 organic visits a month in Ahrefs or Semrush. Its recent posts should have named authors. It shouldn't advertise a "write for us" price list. And the articles should cover your buyers' topics, not a mix of casinos, CBD and SaaS on the same blog.

Niche edits

A niche edit adds your link to an article that's already published and indexed, so the page brings its existing authority and traffic with it. SAASY LINKS' niche edit campaigns average a 22-day turnaround from prospecting to live placement, compared to 45+ days for guest posts. Our niche edits guide explains how to vet the host page, and our niche edits service handles the outreach.

One rule we don't bend: niche edits from sites under DR 30 aren't worth the outreach email. The authority passed is negligible, and you're spending time on links that won't move rankings.

Testimonial links

Write a testimonial for a tool you use, and many vendors will publish it with a link to your site. These are easy and often land on strong domains. Keep them honest, though. Google's policies list "exchanging goods or services for links" as link spam, so a testimonial written only to get the link is a risk.

.edu and .gov links

Links from university and government sites have a reputation they don't fully deserve. Google has never said it weights these domains higher; the value comes from the individual page's authority and relevance. A link from an active research page is strong. A link from a student's abandoned blog on a .edu subdomain isn't.

Image and infographic embeds

When other sites embed your chart or infographic with a credit link, you get a backlink for each embed. It works best with original data people want to cite. It gets risky when the embed code stuffs keyword anchors, which Google's policies treat much like widget links.

The easiest version is reverse image search. Upload your published charts to Google Images, find sites that used them without credit, and ask for a link. Most site owners add one without argument because they know they should have.

Backlink Types With Brand and AI Value

Four types land in the Bonus group: most of these links are nofollow and pass little ranking value, but they put your brand where buyers and AI assistants look. Build them for visibility and referral traffic. Don't count them toward your link targets.

Review sites and directories

G2, Capterra, Product Hunt and Crunchbase all have a Domain Rating of 91, according to Ahrefs data we pulled in September 2026. TrustRadius and GetApp sit at 85, SaaSHub at 81 and AlternativeTo at 80. Many profile links are nofollow, but a complete profile takes under an hour and shows up for branded searches. Our list of free backlinks includes the full set of SaaS directories worth claiming.

Reddit and forum links

Reddit links are nofollow, so they pass almost no PageRank. But Reddit threads rank in Google and get cited by AI assistants, and the OppAlerts study found Reddit posts correlate at +0.128 with AI visibility. SAASY LINKS ran a Reddit campaign for a project management tool that produced 23 threads with real engagement; within three months the brand appeared in Perplexity answers for "best project management tools."

Promotional posts don't work there. Reddit's spam filters flag them within hours, and repeat offenders get shadow-banned, so your posts look live to you while nobody else sees them. Answer questions in the subreddits your buyers use and mention your product only when it's the honest answer.

Podcast and webinar links

Guest on a podcast and the show notes usually link to your site. The link itself is modest. The bigger return is the audience and the transcript, which search engines and AI models can read and quote.

Look for shows your buyers listen to, not the biggest shows in marketing. A niche podcast with 2,000 listeners in your market beats a general show with 50,000 who'll never buy. Pitch a specific episode idea, not a bio.

Social profile links

Links from LinkedIn, X and YouTube profiles are nofollow and won't move rankings. They do help search engines connect your brand across the web, and they're the first place a curious buyer checks. Fill them out once and move on.

Backlink Types That Can Hurt Your Rankings

Four types belong in the Avoid group: they exist to manipulate rankings, and Google has a system built to spot them. Its December 2022 link spam update said SpamBrain "can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links." The usual result is that the links quietly stop counting.

PBN links

A private blog network is a set of sites one owner builds only to link out. They often use expired domains with leftover authority. They work until they're caught, and then every link from the network stops counting at once, sometimes with a manual action attached.

You can usually spot a PBN site in a few minutes. The domain's history in the Wayback Machine shows a different business, the content is thin and covers unrelated topics, there's no real author or contact page, and nearly every post links out to a commercial site with a keyword anchor.

Paid marketplace links

Buying a dofollow link is against Google's spam policies unless it's marked sponsored, and marking it sponsored removes the ranking value you paid for. Cheap marketplaces are the worst of it. SAASY LINKS tested a batch of 10 marketplace brand mentions sold at $49 each, and 7 were on sites with under 100 monthly visitors. Our breakdown of high quality backlinks shows what a link worth paying for looks like instead.

Link exchange schemes

Swapping a link with a partner now and then is normal. Google's spam policies target "excessive link exchanges" and "partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking." Automated exchange networks and three-way swaps are built to hide that pattern, and they rarely hide it for long.

Comment and Web 2.0 spam

Blog comment links, forum signatures, bookmark sites and throwaway Web 2.0 blogs were cheap link sources in 2010. Today most are ugc or nofollow, and the rest are exactly what SpamBrain looks for. Software that creates them by the thousand is still sold. Don't buy it.

The Backlink Value-Risk Matrix: Where to Spend in 2026

The Backlink Value-Risk Matrix plots every backlink type on two axes: how much ranking value it passes and how risky it gets when done cheaply. That gives four groups: Build, Vet hard, Bonus and Avoid. Most of your budget belongs in Build, with Vet hard links added only after you've checked the site.

Placement in the matrix is by type, so treat it as a starting point. A niche edit on a trusted industry blog behaves like a Build link. A listicle mention on a site that sells every spot behaves like an Avoid link. Check the actual page before you commit, the same way you would for any single backlink.

The mix shifts with your stage. A new SaaS site gets fast wins from integration pages, review profiles and reclaimed mentions, because those don't depend on authority. Once you're past DR 30 or so, editorial links, listicle mentions and digital PR start paying back the extra effort.

Which Types of Backlinks Matter for AI Search?

The types of backlinks that matter most for AI search are listicle mentions, editorial links and Reddit threads, because they're the pages AI assistants read when building an answer. Ranking value and AI value don't always match. A nofollow Reddit thread can do more for AI visibility than a followed guest post nobody reads.

So measure the two separately. Track rankings for the links you build for SEO, and track brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for the links you build for visibility. A campaign built only on dofollow links misses half of what's driving discovery in 2026.

How to Check Which Backlink Types You Already Have

Export your backlinks from Ahrefs or Semrush, then tag each referring domain by type. Filter by link attribute to see your dofollow share, and sort by referring page traffic to find your strongest links. An hour of tagging shows which types are carrying your rankings.

Google Search Console's Links report is free and shows your top linking sites and the pages they link to. It doesn't show attributes, so pair it with a crawler or a backlink tool when you need the dofollow split.

Look for two warning signs. A profile that's mostly directory, comment and profile links means you've got visibility but little ranking value. A sudden cluster of links from unrelated sites with near-identical anchors usually means someone built PBN or marketplace links, and those are worth disavowing only if you've received a manual action.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 3 main types of backlinks?

The three main ways to classify backlinks are by attribute (dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, ugc), by placement (body text, image, bio, footer) and by source (editorial, guest post, directory and so on). When people say "3 types", they usually mean dofollow, nofollow and sponsored.

How many types of backlinks are there?

There's no fixed number of types of backlinks. Lists range from 4 to 30+ depending on how finely they split link sources. This guide covers 20 types by source, plus four attributes and five placements that apply to every link.

Which type of backlink is best for SEO?

Editorial links from relevant, well-trafficked sites are the best type for SEO. They pass the most ranking value, carry almost no risk and are the hardest for competitors to copy. For SaaS companies, listicle mentions on pages that rank for buying keywords come a close second.

Are nofollow backlinks worthless?

No. Nofollow links usually pass no ranking value, but they still send referral traffic and brand exposure. Google has also treated nofollow as a hint since 2020, so it may count some of them.

What's the difference between backlinks and internal links?

A backlink comes from another website to yours. An internal link connects two pages on your own site. Both pass ranking value, but only backlinks bring in new authority from outside.

Are .edu and .gov backlinks better than other links?

Not automatically. Google hasn't said it gives these domains extra weight. A link from a strong, relevant .edu page is valuable, while one from an abandoned student page is not.

Do social media links count as backlinks?

Technically yes, but almost all are nofollow and pass no ranking value. They help people and search engines connect your brand across platforms, which is worth a few minutes of setup.