Quality backlinks: how to build a link profile that improves your rankings

Backlinks — links from other websites to yours — have been one of Google's most important ranking factors since the day it was founded. The idea behind them is simple: if other reputable sites link to your content, you're probably offering something of value. Google treats every backlink as a "vote of confidence" — but not all votes are worth the same. A link from a national newspaper or Wikipedia is worth orders of magnitude more than a thousand links from spam sites or low-quality directories. In this guide you'll find everything you need to build a healthy link profile: what makes a quality backlink, the white hat strategies that really work, how to analyse your existing profile and how to defend yourself against toxic links someone might point at your site to harm it.

Sources: Ahrefs, study of 1 billion pages (2020); Backlinko (2023)

What makes a quality backlink: the factors that count

There's no magic formula for calculating a backlink's value, but there are several factors Google considers when weighing a link. The most important is the authority of the source domain: a link from a site with lots of quality links pointing to it is worth far more than a link from a new site or one with little authority. Tools such as Ahrefs measure this with Domain Rating (DR), Semrush with Authority Score and Moz with Domain Authority — they aren't Google metrics, but they're useful proxies for estimating sites' relative authority. The second factor is topical relevance: a link from a site that covers the same subject as yours is worth more than a link from a site on a completely different topic. Google uses topical relevance to understand whether a link is "natural" — a cooking site linking to an SEO guide makes less sense than a digital marketing site doing the same. The third factor is the link's context: a link placed in the body of a relevant article (an editorial link) is worth much more than a link in a footer, a sidebar or a directory list.

The anchor text — the visible text of the link — is another element Google assesses. Descriptive anchor text that includes the target keyword helps Google understand what the destination page is about. However, a link profile with too many identical, keyword-optimised anchors is a sign of artificial link building that can trigger algorithmic or manual penalties. A natural link profile includes a variety of anchor texts: branded (the site or company name), generic ("click here", "read more"), naked URLs (the full URL as the text), partially optimised anchors and a few exact-match keyword anchors. The link's position on the page matters too: links in the main content carry more weight than those in the footer or sidebar, which are often ignored or devalued by the algorithm. Finally, there's the do-follow vs no-follow attribute: links with rel="nofollow" don't pass PageRank (the SEO "juice"), while do-follow links (those without special attributes) do. However, no-follow links can have indirect value too, because they bring real traffic and diversify the link profile naturally.

White hat strategies for building quality backlinks

Content marketing: attracting links with exceptional content

The most sustainable strategy for building backlinks is to create content other sites want to link to spontaneously — so-called link bait. That doesn't mean generic "link-optimised" content: it means original research with exclusive data, definitive guides that answer a question better than anyone else, useful free tools (calculators, checkers, templates), and infographics with up-to-date data or innovative visualisations. If you publish original research on the Italian SEO market with data that doesn't exist anywhere else, industry sites that want to cite that figure have a reason to link to you. The drawback of this strategy is that it requires an investment of time and quality — but links earned this way are the most valuable and long-lasting. A more accessible variant is Brian Dean's skyscraper technique: find the most-linked content in your sector on a specific topic, create something significantly better (more complete, more up to date, with more recent data), then contact the sites linking to the original and suggest yours as a superior alternative.

Digital PR and editorial links

Digital PR means building relationships with journalists, bloggers and creators in your sector to earn mentions and editorial links. The most effective channel in Italy is answering journalists' requests on platforms such as Italian HARO (Help A Reporter Out), Facebook groups of journalists looking for sources, or contacting newsrooms directly with an expert comment on a current story. If you're an SEO consultant and a journalist is writing an article about the cost of SEO, offering yourself as an expert source can earn you a link from a national newspaper or an industry magazine — links that will keep their value for years. The key is to position yourself as an authoritative expert on a specific topic and to be reachable and responsive when opportunities arise.

Guest posting: guidelines for doing it right

Guest posting — writing articles for other sites in exchange for a link — is still a valid strategy if done properly. Google penalises low-quality guest posting used purely for link building: generic articles, irrelevant sites, artificially optimised anchor text. Quality guest posting is different: you write genuinely useful content for the host site's audience, the site is relevant to your sector and has a real readership, and the link is pertinent to the context. Choose sites with a DR above 40–50 (on Ahrefs), with verifiable real organic traffic, that publish up-to-date content regularly and have real audience engagement. Avoid so-called "link farms" — sites set up specifically to sell links, with generic content, anonymous authors and no real audience.

Broken link building: find opportunities where others don't look

Broken link building means identifying broken links on relevant sites (links pointing to 404 pages or to sites that no longer exist), creating or having content that could replace what was linked, and contacting the webmaster to report the broken link and suggest your content as a replacement. It's a win-win strategy: the webmaster has a reason to fix a broken link (it improves the quality of their site) and you earn a backlink from a page already set up to link to content like yours. Tools such as Ahrefs Site Explorer have specific features for finding broken links on any domain — you can analyse the competitors of the sites you want to target and find all the resources they link to that no longer exist.

How to analyse your site's backlink profile

Before building new backlinks, it's essential to understand the current state of your link profile. With Ahrefs or Semrush, enter your domain in Site Explorer/Backlink Analytics and analyse: the total number of referring domains (unique domains linking to you — more important than the total number of links, because 1,000 links from the same site are worth far less than 100 links from 100 different sites), the Domain Rating distribution of the source sites (you want a natural distribution, not only low-DR sites), the most-used anchor texts (check there are no artificial patterns) and recently lost links (a sudden drop in links can explain a fall in traffic). Ahrefs' Link Intersect feature is particularly useful: it shows the sites that link to all your competitors but not to you — direct outreach opportunities.

For free analysis, Google Search Console shows in its "Links" section the sites that link to you most, the pages on your site that receive the most links and the most-used anchor texts. The data is less complete than paid tools, but it's the data Google itself uses — so it's the most reliable for understanding what Google actually sees.

Toxic links and disavow: how to protect your site

Toxic links are backlinks from spam sites, link farms, PBNs (Private Blog Networks) or sites penalised by Google. They can arrive through so-called negative SEO — someone deliberately pointing spam links at your site to damage your rankings — or they can be links you built in the past with techniques that are now obsolete. The Disavow tool in Google Search Console lets you tell Google to ignore specific links when calculating your rankings. It's a powerful tool but one to use with caution: if you disavow quality links by mistake, you could damage your rankings. Before using it, check every suspicious link manually (look at the source site, the link's context and whether the site has real traffic) and try contacting the webmaster to remove the link before resorting to disavow. Disavow should be the last resort, not the first.

Common link building mistakes

The future of backlinks: AI and new signals

As AI and Google's natural language understanding systems evolve, the relative weight of backlinks compared with other signals is gradually changing. Google has become much better at assessing content quality independently of links — excellent articles on new sites can now rank for competitive keywords faster than was possible five years ago. However, backlinks remain essential for competitive queries and for establishing a domain's topical authority over the long term. The direction is towards an increasingly qualitative assessment of links: not just DR and anchor text, but topical consistency, editorial context and the overall quality of the source site. Investing in high-quality white hat link building — a few excellent links from authoritative sources — is the strategy most resistant to both current and future algorithm changes.

Link building for local businesses in Italy

For a local business — a restaurant, a professional practice, a shop or a consultant working in a specific city — link building has a geographical dimension that makes it different from link building for national or international sites. The most valuable links for local SEO come from geographically relevant sources: the Chamber of Commerce, the town council, local trade associations, regional newspapers, quality local directories and local blogs. A link from a local newspaper such as the Corriere dell'Umbria (for a business in Perugia) or from a regional Chamber of Commerce is extremely valuable for local rankings, often more than a link from a generic national site with a high Domain Rating. NAP citations (Name, Address, Phone) — even without a link — contribute to local visibility: every consistent mention of the business's name and address on directories, portals and local sites strengthens the geographical signal Google uses for the Local Pack. Make sure the name, address and phone number are identical across all platforms: website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, Pagine Gialle and any other directory. Even small discrepancies ("Via Roma 5" vs "Via Roma, 5" vs "V.le Roma 5") can reduce Google's confidence in the business's information.

To earn local links, the most effective strategies are: taking part in local events and getting mentioned by the media covering them, sponsoring local events or associations that publish sponsors' logos on their websites, partnering with complementary (non-competing) businesses for mutual mentions, and creating locally useful content that local sites will want to link to — area guides, resources for residents, analyses of the local market. Press releases sent to local outlets about openings, partnerships or special events can also generate links from authoritative, geographically relevant sources.

How to measure the ROI of link building

Measuring the return on investment of link building is more complex than for other marketing channels because results aren't immediate and are hard to attribute to individual actions. Still, there are concrete metrics that let you assess the effectiveness of link building over time. The first indicator is growth in Domain Rating (Ahrefs) or Authority Score (Semrush): although it isn't a Google metric, it reflects accumulated link authority and tends to correlate with ranking improvements. The second indicator is the average position of your target keywords in Google Search Console: a systematic rise in position for the keywords you were targeting, in the weeks after earning important links, is a direct sign of effectiveness. The third indicator is organic traffic to the segment of optimised pages: if the pages you built links for receive more organic traffic, you're seeing the real effect on the business. For a more rigorous assessment, use a before-and-after model: track the metrics for 3 months before starting link building and compare them with the following 3 months, isolating other factors such as content updates or technical changes to the site as far as possible. A typical investment in professional link building starts at €500–1,500 a month for sustainable white hat work, with noticeable results in 4–6 months for medium-difficulty keywords.

Quality link building takes strategy, relationships and content that deserves to be linked. If you'd like a link acquisition plan tailored to your sector and an analysis of your current backlink profile, explore the SEO service or contact me to start with an analysis of where you stand today.