What Are The Most Powerful Backlinks?

When looking for the best, most powerful backlinks for your website, it’s crucial you take into account the correct parameters before jumping in.

At the end of the day, backlinks are still one of, if not the most important ranking factor for websites in Google’s eyes, so getting your link building campaign right is of massive importance.

Not only that, with Google’s latest algorithm changes, finding the strongest links for your site is more important than ever.

In this article, we’ll discuss the many different factors to consider when acquiring new links, as well as what to look out for in 2024.

What Makes a Link Powerful?

A powerful backlink in 2024 consists of several different factors as a result of Google’s ever-changing algorithm.

Here are the main factors that make a backlink powerful:

Dofollow

To start things off, it’s important to establish that for any link to pass all of its power through to your site, it must be a dofollow link.

This is an attribution that enables the power of the link to pass through to your site, instructing Google’s spiders to “follow” the link through to your site.

In contrast, a nofollow link instructs the opposite and therefore passes significantly less power.

That’s not to say a nofollow link is inherently bad; however, your links from powerful sites should mostly be dofollow if possible.

Strong Domain Rank (DR)

A link from a strong domain is the pillar of any good link, as these links that are powerful on a domain level generally are well-established websites with a strong backlink profile, and capable of having new links built to them to improve your backlink.

This metric, often described as a strong DR (domain rating), is something more and more marketers are starting to take into account when looking to build backlinks to their sites.

Strong domain sites are generally harder to acquire backlinks from due to their increased value, but are worth the extra time, effort and sometimes money to acquire.

Additionally, whilst this isn’t always the case, strong domains are generally websites that have aged and have a level of trust to begin with, which further increases their value as a backlink.

DR stands for domain rating by ahrefs and other similar metrics are DA (domain authority) by Moz. Page level metrics are UR (URL rating by ahrefs) and PA (page authority by Moz).

Strong Page Rank (PR)

The strength of the actual page you’re acquiring the link from matters a great deal, too.

Many SEOs solely focus on the domain rating (DR) of the prospect site, and forget to consider the power of the page (PR) as well.

The page strength (or page rank) is extremely important, as having a page with power linking back to your website means that the power from that specific page is being passed through.

Whilst having a strong domain is an excellent foundation, if the URL you receive a link from doesn’t have any links pointing to it, it’s likely that page will actually be very weak.

Therefore, finding pages with pre-existing power, or building that power yourself is the key to ensuring your links are from strong, high authority pages, and pass even more of the link juice through to your website.

Traffic

The next factor to analyse when it comes to acquiring new links is traffic.

Contrary to what some may believe, traffic is a seriously important ranking factor, and having a link from a site that receives genuine, authentic traffic for it’s chosen keywords is an excellent way to ensure your backlinks are the best they can be.

It’s very important you analyse the traffic signals going to site you’re interested in getting a link from, as sometimes this can be the difference between a link that moves the needle and a link that does not.

Additionally, if you can find a site where a specific page you want a link from is receiving a lot of that traffic, even better!

Having a link from a page that receives traffic, especially if relevant to your industry, means that not only is the link more powerful, but real people interested in your products or services may actually click through to your link. Win win!

Trust

That brings us onto trust.

So regardless how powerful a site may seem, or how much traffic it seems to receive, if that power or traffic has been manipulated then it could be that the links you’ve acquired may not be trustworthy in Google’s eyes.

You may be wondering “How do I measure trust?”, and the answer is simple.

Trust can be determined by analyzing a number of factors, some of which are technical and some requiring analysis based on common sense. Here are several ways you can determine trust:

• How well the website is ranking for its keyphrases
• The amount of traffic the site receives (and whether that traffic looks legitimate!)
• The legitimacy and relevancy of the backlinks pointing back to that particular site
• How the site appears (does it look spammy?)
• The sites history (was it previously used as a PBN?)
• The age of the website
• Existing content on the website (are there many sponsored posts?)

and more.

Analysing these factors is often over-looked by many, and can land website owners in getting links that seem good on the surface, but may be not seen so favourably in the eyes of Google.

Low Toxicity

Ensuring a link is low in toxicity is another factor worth considering, and this ties in with trust above.

Toxicity, is a metric that determines how dangerous or spammy a website is based off various factors such as backlink history, domain quality, page quality and more.

Link Research Tools is an excellent and reliable way to analyse this, as their tool is able to grade sites with a DTOXRISK score (essentially a measure of the site’s toxicity).

In taking the time to analyse sites within Link Research Tools (LRC), you can ensure the links you’re acquiring are largely risk-free in the eyes of Google, and much more likely to have a positive effect on your rankings in the SERPs.

Link Position

And finally, the position of your link on the page is an often over-looked factor when it comes to ensuring your backlinks are as powerful as they can be.

As we know, Google crawls pages from the top down. But with so much of the internet to crawl and more and more pages being published every day, Google is having a hard time working through the entirety of each page.

As a result Google’s spiders will work through sections of a page, starting from the top and working it’s way down efficiently to use as little resources as it can.

What this means for link builders is that if you request your link to be positioned higher up the page, that section is more likely to be indexed by Google, and in turn more likely to pass the power through to your site.

It’s one of those if you know you know tips, but can certainly work extremely well when implemented across your link building campaign.

How Do You Build Powerful Backlinks?

With so many different techniques out there, it’s safe to say there’s no set way to build powerful backlinks.

One thing we would say is that if you’re not an experienced SEO, or haven’t had experience building backlinks for your site before, it’s always best to outsource to an expert to avoid wasting money and having a detrimental effect on your website’s rankings in the search engine results pages.

Agencies such as Searcharoo are known to be brilliant at offer a done-for-you link building service, in fact we’ve worked with them in the past and noticed some excellent results from their niche-specific packages.

What Types of Powerful Links Can I Build?

As of 2024, we believe that once all necessary checks have been carried out, these are the best types of powerful links to build:

• Guest Posts
• Niche Edits
• Barnacle SEO Links
• PBNs
• Digital PR Links
• HARO Links
• Press Releases

What Are The Weakest Backlinks in 2024?

There are also several backlink types that seem to have little to no value in Google’s current algorithm. These include:

• Nofollow links
• Not incontent links (sidebar & footer)
• Blog comments
• Fiverr Gigs
• Sponsored links
• Irrelevant links
• Links on orphan pages

Although the list above shows weaker types of backlinks – we do recommend diversity in the backlink profile and we call these pillow links or foundational links.

What are top tier backlinks?

Top-tier backlinks are dofollow, relevant, contextual hyperlinks on high-DR authoritative websites.

Tier 1 backlinks point back to your website and carry significant weight in search engine algorithms.

If the link is placed on a web page without internal links (orphan page), we strongly recommend powering these web pages up with powerful tier 2 backlinks.

Building top tier backlinking strategies is crucial to enhancing rankings in Google SERP.

Can you buy quality backlinks?

You can buy quality backlinks from specialized link-building companies or SEO agencies.

Always be warned about purchasing backlinks from cheap marketplace link sellers or private link sellers because every backlink carries some toxicity.

All links should be from a legitimate website in a good and reputable link neighborhood.

Summary

So to summarise, carrying out an in-depth analysis of the quality of backlink you’re acquiring before jumping in and getting in can be the difference between time well spent, and time wasted.

Links are still as powerful as ever, but if you’re lazy in your link acquisition you may find yourself building links that actually end up doing more harm than good.

We wish you the best of luck with your link-building campaigns and hope our guide to the most valuable type of backlink in SEO contributes to the domain authority of a website and increases its search engine rankings.