About a thousand Australians a month search for “types of backlinks” (Ahrefs, August 2026), and most of what they find is a filing system. Dofollow and nofollow. Editorial, directory, profile, forum, image. Categories all the way down.
The filing system isn’t the useful cut. There’s one question that sorts links faster than any taxonomy: would this link exist if you hadn’t asked for it?
The line that actually matters
Everything Google has built over the past fifteen years is aimed at telling earned links from placed ones. Every update that wiped out an agency’s link inventory was a better attempt at the same question.
An earned link is somebody citing you because your page was the most useful thing they could point at. A placed link is one you arranged, whether by paying, swapping or filling in a form. The first kind kept working through every update. The second kind works until the next one.
That doesn’t make asking for links dishonest. Telling a supplier they’ve spelled your name wrong on their partner page is asking, and it’s fine. The test is whether the link is a fair description of a real relationship or a fact.
What a link is doing for you
It helps crawlers find the page, which still matters on sites where the internal linking is a mess.
It passes a signal of trust from a site that already has some. And the words around it tell an engine what your page is about, which is why a link inside a paragraph on a relevant site is worth more than the same link in a footer nobody reads.
There’s also the one everyone forgets: people sometimes click. A link on a page your customers actually read can send you a customer this week, regardless of what it does for rankings.
The types that still work
Coverage that follows a fact you own. Publish a number nobody else has, dated, with the method attached, and people who write about your industry have a reason to point at you. This is the same behaviour that gets a brand cited inside AI answers, which means the work now pays twice.
Association, industry body and regulator listings. Not directories in the 2011 sense. The ones a human being maintains and readers actually use.
Supplier, partner, distributor and client pages. If you install someone’s product, resell it, are certified in it or appear as their case study, there’s a link sitting there unclaimed. Most businesses have a dozen of these and have never gone looking.
Local and community footprint. Sponsorship, awards, event listings, the club whose jerseys carry your logo. These are cheap, boring and durable, and they’re genuinely hard for a competitor interstate to replicate.
Tools, templates and calculators that solve a small problem completely. People link to things they want to find again.
Being quotable. Podcasts, panels, journalist requests, expert commentary. Answer like a specialist rather than an advertisement and you’ll get quoted; answer like a brochure and you won’t.
Unlinked mentions. Search your own brand name and you’ll find pages that talk about you without linking. Asking is the highest-converting outreach there is and it takes an afternoon.
The types that are theatre
Blog comments. Mass directory submissions. Article sites. Guest posts on blogs whose only reason to exist is selling guest posts. Private blog networks. Reciprocal exchanges run at scale. Forum signatures. Social profile links, which are worth having for other reasons and do nothing here.
Two problems with all of it. Most of it does nothing. The paid varieties are a straightforward policy breach, and the risk sits with your domain rather than with whoever sold them, which is a detail the seller never leads with.
The tell is a price list. If someone is offering a number of links per month at a rate per link, you’re buying volume, and volume is exactly the thing that stopped working.
How to judge a link before you chase it
Does the site have real traffic, and does the specific page? Is it about anything near your subject? Is the link inside content a person would read, or in a block of links nobody has looked at since 2014? Would a reader plausibly click it?
One link from a site your customers already read is worth more than fifty from sites nobody visits. That ratio has been true for years and the industry keeps pretending otherwise, because fifty is easier to put on a report.
Anchor text without the paranoia
Natural links are mostly your brand name, your bare URL, the title of the thing you published, or something clumsy like “this article”. That’s what a real link profile looks like.
If you find yourself dictating exact commercial anchors at scale, you’re creating a pattern that only exists when somebody arranged it. Ask for accuracy, not for keywords.
When links are the wrong first move
If your site has structural problems, authority poured into it goes nowhere. Fix the crawl, the templates and the internal linking first, or you’re carrying water in a bucket with a hole in it.
And if you already have authority, the lever is usually elsewhere. AGL is a large domain with plenty of links already; the work there was technical and on-page, plus making sure the brand was cited properly by AI systems. Within six months that produced a 58% increase in average search position, 40% more keywords in the top three, and 14.5k features in Google’s AI Overviews. Not one part of that was a link campaign. The AGL case study sets out what it was instead.
Worth reading alongside our piece on SEO myths in the age of AI, because “more links” and “rewrite everything for AI” are the two answers most often given to problems that are neither.
What I’d do with a year and no PR budget
Pick one fact only you can publish, and publish it every quarter with the method attached, so the number becomes yours to update rather than somebody else’s to invent.
Reclaim your unlinked mentions once a quarter. Make sure every supplier, partner and association you deal with lists you correctly. Say yes to the local sponsorship. Answer journalist requests properly for six months.
None of that is impressive on a slide. It compounds, it survives updates, and it costs less than the link packages that don’t. If you want it run properly rather than in the gaps between other work, that’s part of what our SEO team does.
