High Quality Backlinks: Seven Markers You Can Check Yourself

What is a good backlink?

A good backlink does two jobs. It sends people who might buy, and it passes some of the linking page's standing to yours, which is the part search engines weigh. The second job needs the link to be followed and its page to be crawled; the first needs the link to sit where your buyers already read. A link that does both is what people mean by good backlinks, and one that does neither is a line in a report and little else.

What high quality backlinks do for SEO is easier to describe than to promise. Google's guide to its ranking systems describes its link analysis systems and names PageRank among its core ranking systems, and it publishes no weight for any single link. The markers are the closest thing to a measurement anyone outside Google has. How many links a page needs to compete is set by the pages already ranking for your query, and the count worked out from real sites has a post of its own.

Backlink quality: seven markers and how to check each

Every row below is a question you can answer for any link pointing at your site, in about a minute and without paying for a tool. The last column is what our catalog records about the same marker for the 189 directories we submit to, from its export of 3 November 2026.

Relevant backlinks: whose readers, not whose rating

Relevance is the marker no tool scores well, because it is about people. Ahrefs puts it like this: Links from websites (and pages) on the same topic will have more weight in the eyes of Google than links from completely unrelated websites or pages. The test is plain: would someone who buys your product browse the page that links to you? A SaaS tool listed in a software directory passes it, and the same tool in the sidebar of a recipe blog does not, whatever that blog's rating. Our catalog files each directory we submit to by the products it takes (59 for SaaS and software, 76 for launches and startups and 54 for AI tools), and you choose from those in the dashboard.

How to check backlink quality in a minute

1. Open the page that links to you, right-click your link and choose Inspect. No nofollow, ugc or sponsored in its rel means it is followed; what each rel value tells Google is a post of its own.
2. Paste the page's address into our link preview checker: it reports a noindex in the robots tags or headers and whether the canonical names the page itself. A page that asks not to be indexed is a weak home for any link.
3. Search Google for site: followed by the page's address. A result means Google has the page; none can mean it is new or not indexed yet.
4. Check that the site's own pages link to that page, from a category, a tag or the home page. Google's link best practices put it as a rule for site owners: Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. A page nothing links to is hard for a crawler to reach.
5. Run the linking domain through our free DR checker and write the date beside the number.
6. Read the clickable words, then the site's terms for anything the link depends on: a badge on your site, a paid period, a review that can take the listing down.

On anchor text, the same Google page says Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to. It also reminds writers that the words before and after links matter. On a directory listing those words are your product's name and its description, and through Submitator the description is written for that directory.

Quality backlinks from directories: our catalog against the markers

A directory sets most of the markers once for every listing it publishes, so they can be read for a whole set of links at once. Here is our catalog read that way, by the kind of product each directory takes.

Three markers a directory listing meets by design. The page is about your product, so the link to you is its subject rather than an aside. The words around the link are your product's name and description, never one keyword repeated across sites. And a directory chosen for the kind of product you make puts you among the tools your buyers compare. Two more vary from one directory to the next and sit in the table: our catalog records 116 of the 189 as followed, 18 of them at DR 70 or higher, against a median DR of 42 across all 189.

One marker a listing does not meet: it is not an editorial link, chosen by a writer in the middle of an article. A directory reviews your submission and publishes it by its own rules, which is a different decision from an editor's.

The last marker, whether the link stays, is mostly the badge: 39 of the 116 directories recorded followed ask for one on your site, and several keep the link followed for as long as the badge stays up. With Submitator that part is ours. One component, installed on your site once, shows whichever badges your directories require, keeping each of them up is our job, and you make no commit per directory. How a badge differs from a link swap is answered elsewhere.

The crawl marker is the one we can help with and never promise. We push the listing pages of each order through IndexMachine, our sister product, with nothing for you to connect; Google still decides whether a page enters its index and when. Starter, Growth and Scale each include free indexing ($25 value), and why a new listing can take weeks to show in Google gets a post to itself.

Contextual backlinks and editorial backlinks

A contextual backlink is a link inside the body text of a page, in a sentence about the thing it links to. An editorial backlink is one the site's own writer or editor chose to add, unasked. Most editorial links are contextual, and both are what Ahrefs has in mind when it writes that The most valuable backlinks are those editorially placed somewhere within the content (i.e. not in the footer or sidebar). A link can be contextual without being editorial, when the site placed it because someone asked; editorial is about who decided.

Editorial links come from work that gives a writer a reason to cite you: original data, a free tool, a clear answer to a question journalists ask, a product people talk about. Where our own sites' strongest links came from, and the strategies behind them, are in a post of their own. A directory listing is neither kind. Its value sits in the other markers: a followed link on a page about you, on a site whose rating you can check, filed with dozens of others at once.

High authority backlinks and high DA backlinks

High authority backlinks come from domains with a strong link profile of their own, and the quick way to read one is a third-party score: Domain Rating from Ahrefs or Domain Authority from Moz. They are two companies' numbers on two link indexes, and Moz writes of its own that it’s important to use Domain Authority as a comparative metric rather than an absolute one. A high DA backlink and a high DR one can come from the same site under two different numbers, and how the two scores differ and what counts as a good one is set out in its own post.

Authority is a fact about the domain, and the other markers are facts about the link, so our records keep the two apart. Where a count of a directory's live listings found no followed link, the directory carries a no-equity mark beside its rating, as the cards on our where-to-submit page show: three of them sit at DR 70 or higher. Of the rows recorded followed, 18 sit at DR 70 or higher and 45 at DR 50 or higher, Startup Fame at 84 among them; the directories at DR 50 and up are listed one by one in a post of their own.

One more check keeps a big number honest: whether the site has readers. Some directories publish their own figures, as Startup Fame does with a public analytics dashboard; elsewhere a free traffic estimate from a backlink tool is the next best thing. A link from a site people visit can send you visitors as well as standing.

Toxic backlinks, bad backlinks and low quality backlinks

Toxic backlinks is the name SEO tools use for links that look built to game rankings, and Ahrefs' help center is blunt about the word: just a term made up by certain SEO tools to describe backlinks they think could hurt your website's rankings. On Google's guidance it notes that the guidelines do not specify any specific metric or score that would determine if a backlink is considered manipulative or spammy. Google's own pages speak of spam and low-quality links, and most of what they describe can be spotted by eye:

• Links dropped into comments and forums. The section on user-generated spam in Google's spam policies names Spammy posts on forum threads and Comment spam on blogs.
• Links on hacked pages. Google's definition: Hacked content is any content placed on a site without permission, due to vulnerabilities in a site's security. A link to you inside text that has nothing to do with the page around it is the tell.
• Links hidden from readers: text in the colour of the background, a link on a single character, a block pushed off the screen. The same policies list each of these under hidden text and link abuse.
• Anchors stuffed with one keyword, repeated across sites that have nothing else in common. Earned links name you in whatever words the writer chose.
• A sudden run of links from sites on topics nothing like yours, in a language your buyers do not read.

Google's link spam list names low-quality directory links as well, and which web directories are still worth a listing is answered in a post of its own.

Should you disavow bad backlinks?

Usually not. Google's page on disavowing links says In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool. It sets two conditions for using the tool, both at once: You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site. A few junk links pointing at your site, with no manual action in Search Console and no scheme of your own to undo, is not a reason to open the tool.

How to build high quality backlinks

Work from the markers backwards: start where a followed, relevant link is the normal outcome, and put the effort into editorial links once you have something people cite. The strategies by source, ranked by cost and by who decides each link, are one post; for anyone weighing high quality link building services, what a link costs from a service is another. If you want free high quality backlinks first, the routes that cost nothing have a list of their own, and where Google draws the line on tactics is the subject of another.

Pick by the markers, and we file the rest

Submitator files your product to the directories in our catalog, and the markers above are how to choose among them. Each directory shows its DR in the dashboard as you tick it. After you order, filling the forms is our side of the deal: every directory gets its own description, sized to what that form allows, and a badge directory asks nothing extra of you, because its badge joins the others on the component we keep live.

Most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours, every directory within 21 days at most. Each directory reviews by its own rules, so rejections happen; when one declines you, a replacement directory of your choice is added to your selection by default (All Directories already holds the whole catalog, so it has nothing to swap in). A refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms. And a directory enters the catalog once we have run a submission to it from start to finish, which is how it stands at 170+ directories and not thousands.

Starter is $29 for 30 directories, Growth $49 for 60 and Scale $79 for 100, each paid once; All Directories is $149 for every directory in the catalog, those added after you buy included. The Scale card also lists Re-submission if removed, which speaks to the last marker on this page.