A backlink example is simply another website’s text or image linking back to your site, like a supplier page mentioning “delivery partner ABC Ltd” with ABC Ltd hyperlinked to abclimited.co.uk. You’ll spot them in blog posts citing your research, directory listings, guest articles you’ve written, or press coverage naming your company. Some show as plain text URLs, others as anchor text within a sentence, and a few appear as clickable images or logos in footers and partner pages.
The short version: a backlink is just a piece of HTML on someone else’s site that points to yours, usually an anchor tag with your URL inside it, sitting inside a sentence or a list on their page. Some are worth ranking positions, most you’ll never notice, and a few are actively bad for you. I’ll show you what each one looks like on the page, in the code, and in a tool like Ahrefs, because that’s the bit almost nobody screenshots.
The plainest possible example first
Strip away every bit of SEO jargon and a backlink looks like this on a webpage:
“For more on this, see Lilach Bullock’s guide to how to build topical authority.”
The words “how to build topical authority” are blue, underlined, and clickable. In the code behind that sentence, it reads roughly as:
<a href=”https://www.lilachbullock.com/how-to-build-topical-authority/”>how to build topical authority</a>
That’s it. That is the entire mechanism. Every backlink, whether it came from a £3,000 PR campaign or a random Reddit comment, is that same tag with different content wrapped around it. The value comes from three things sitting around that tag: who put it there, where on the page it sits, and whether search engines are told to follow it or ignore it.
A real one from my own site, walked through
In 2023 I got a mention in a roundup piece on a mid-size marketing blog, the kind with maybe 40,000 monthly visitors, nothing huge. The sentence was: “Marketing consultants like Lilach Bullock have been saying this for years.” My name was linked to my homepage. That link had three things going for it that made it worth more than most: it sat in the main body content (not the footer), it was surrounded by relevant text about marketing consultants, and it was a dofollow link, meaning the code had no rel=”nofollow” attribute added.
Compare that to a link I got the same year from a random business directory site. Same mechanism, an anchor tag, but it sat in a sidebar list of 200 other businesses, alphabetically ordered, with zero surrounding context, and it was nofollow. In Ahrefs, that directory link showed up with a Domain Rating of 21. The marketing blog link showed a Domain Rating of 38. Neither number tells you the full story on its own, but the difference in placement and context mattered more than the DR gap did. That directory link did nothing for my rankings. The blog mention correlated with a small bump in referral traffic, about 60 extra visits over the following month, and I could trace roughly a dozen of them straight through to a discovery call booking.
What a good backlink looks like on the page
Good backlinks share a few visible traits you can spot without any tool:
- They sit inside a full sentence or paragraph, not a list of fifty other links with no context around them.
- The anchor text describes what you’ll find on the other end, not something stuffed with keywords like “best cheap SEO consultant London 2026.”
- The linking page is about something related to your page, not a totally unrelated topic with a link bolted on.
- The page the link sits on gets real traffic. You can often tell by checking if the article has comments, social shares, or shows up when you search a chunk of its own text in quotes on Google.
A Forbes Councils contributor piece I wrote in 2022 is a good example. It ran on forbes.com, inside a proper article with my name in the byline and a link back to my site in the author bio. That single link, sitting on a domain most SEOs would call one of the highest-authority news sites on the internet, has outperformed dozens of smaller links combined, both in rankings and in the number of people who click through simply because they trust Forbes.
What a bad backlink looks like
Bad links also have visible patterns, and once you’ve seen a few you spot them instantly:
- They appear on pages with no real subject, often a wall of unrelated links under a heading like “resources” or “partners” with fifty other sites listed.
- The anchor text is exact-match and repeated identically across dozens of other sites, something like “best AI consultant UK” appearing word for word on ten unrelated blogs.
- The site itself is in a completely unrelated language or niche, a gambling or pharmaceutical site linking to a marketing blog, for instance.
- The link sits in a comment section or a forum signature, often automated, added by a bot rather than a person.
I once ran a link audit for a client and found 340 backlinks from what looked like Indonesian recipe blogs, all pointing to her law firm’s contact page with the anchor text “cheap lawyer near me.” None of those pages had ever mentioned law, lawyers, or anything remotely relevant. Someone had bought a cheap link package years earlier without knowing what they were buying. We disavowed the lot through Google Search Console and her rankings improved within six weeks, which tells you plenty about how much those links were quietly dragging her down rather than helping.
The different shapes backlinks come in
Editorial links
These are the ones a journalist or blogger adds naturally because your content answered a question they had. Someone writing a guide on keyword tracking might link to a page like a piece on keyword ranking history because it adds something their own article didn’t cover. These are the hardest to get and the most valuable, because nobody can buy their way into them.
Guest post links
You write an article for someone else’s blog, and in exchange you get a link, usually in the author bio or once within the body. These still work, but Google has tightened its view on them since 2023 and treats obviously paid or low-effort guest posts with suspicion. The tell is usually the anchor text: natural guest post links say things like “her guide on WordPress SEO plugins,” while spammy ones say “best plugins 2026 click here.”
Directory and citation links
Think Yelp, industry-specific directories, local chamber of commerce sites. These are almost always nofollow now and carry little ranking weight, but they still bring occasional referral traffic and help with local trust signals, particularly for service businesses.
Unlinked mentions
Worth knowing about even though they’re not technically backlinks: someone writes your name or your brand without linking it. Tools like Google Alerts or Ahrefs’ Content Explorer can find these, and a polite email asking them to add the link converts a decent number of them, in my experience roughly one in five replies positively when you ask nicely and make it easy.
Where people go wrong chasing the wrong metric
Here’s the bit most link-building guides skate past: Domain Rating and Domain Authority are made-up numbers from third-party tools, not Google metrics, and chasing a high one is often a waste of a client’s budget. I’ve seen a link from a DR 15 site drive more actual business than a DR 70 link, simply because the DR 15 site had a small, loyal, highly relevant readership who clicked through and bought something, while the DR 70 site was a huge general news outlet whose readers skimmed past the mention entirely. The number on the tool tells you almost nothing about whether a human being will click that link and become a customer. If you only optimise for the score, you’ll end up with a backlink profile that looks impressive in a spreadsheet and does very little for your business.
What correlates with ranking movement, based on every audit I’ve run, is topical relevance and real traffic on the linking page, not the authority score alone. This is part of why building topical authority across your own content matters more than most link-building checklists admit; a strong, focused site earns better links naturally because people trust it enough to reference it without being asked.
Step by step: finding and checking your own backlinks
- Open Google Search Console, go to Links in the left menu, and click “Top linking sites” under external links. This is free and gives you Google’s own view, not a third-party estimate.
- For a fuller picture, run your domain through Ahrefs’ free backlink checker or Ubersuggest, which will show Domain Rating, anchor text, and whether each link is dofollow or nofollow.
- Open ten of your links directly in a browser. Look at where on the page they sit, what the surrounding text says, and whether the site looks like a real, maintained property with actual visitors.
- Flag anything that looks like a link farm, an unrelated niche, or repeated identical exact-match anchor text across many domains.
- Disavow the toxic ones through Search Console’s disavow tool, but only the clearly spammy ones; disavowing too aggressively can strip away links that were helping.
This whole process takes about 90 minutes for a small business site with a few hundred links, and it’s worth doing every quarter, the same cadence I’d recommend for reviewing which SEO plugins you’ve got installed, since both tend to accumulate clutter you forgot about.
A note on where backlinks sit alongside newer search behaviour
Backlinks still matter for classic Google rankings, but they’re not the whole game any more. AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from sources differently, often favouring pages that are cited, quoted, and structured clearly rather than pages with the heaviest backlink profile. If you want to check whether your content is even being picked up in that world, running something like a quick AEO audit alongside your usual link review gives you a fuller picture of where your visibility stands in 2026.
Backlink HTML code: what a backlink looks like in the source
When people search for a backlink example they usually want to see the code, not a definition. Here’s the whole thing. A backlink is one anchor tag on someone else’s page pointing at yours:
<a href="https://www.lilachbullock.com/what-do-backlinks-look-like-real-examples/">what backlinks look like</a>Three parts matter. The href is the destination, and it has to be your exact URL, with the right protocol and trailing slash, or the link leaks value through a redirect. The anchor text is the clickable words, and search engines read it as a description of your page. The rel attribute is the part most people never look at. If it’s missing, the link is do-follow and passes authority. If it reads rel=”nofollow”, rel=”sponsored” or rel=”ugc”, it’s still a real backlink for referral traffic, but it tells search engines to treat it with less weight. To check any link on a live page, right click it, choose Inspect, and read the anchor tag in the panel that opens. That 10-second check tells you more than any backlink tool.
To see how a site is structured before you chase a link on it, run it through my free website mapping tool.
To see how many backlinks a site already has before you write yours, run it through my free backlink checker.
Want your article or link on this site? I publish sponsored guest posts and link insertions for relevant businesses, on a blog with real search traffic and a weekly newsletter. Read the guidelines and email [email protected] with the topic or the URL you want linked. I reply to every serious request.
What does a good backlink example look like, and a bad one?
A good backlink example is a link from a relevant, trusted page that sits naturally in the content and passes authority to you, while a bad backlink example is a link stuffed into an unrelated, low-quality page purely to manipulate rankings. Picture the difference between a florist being mentioned in a wedding planner’s blog post about local suppliers, versus that same florist’s link appearing in a comment section on a gambling site in another language. Same HTML tag, wildly different value.
To check whether a backlink you have or one you’re considering is good or bad, look at the linking page itself first, not just the domain it sits on. Open the page in your browser and ask: would a human reader find this link useful in context, or does it look bolted on. Check the anchor text for natural phrasing rather than a keyword crammed in. Check whether the site has actual content around it, real articles, a real about page, not just hundreds of outbound links to unrelated businesses. And check in your search console or a backlink tool whether the link is dofollow or nofollow, since that changes how much weight it carries.
The common mistake I see small business owners make is chasing the number of backlinks rather than the quality, often through link exchanges or paid directory packages that promise volume. Ten spammy links can quietly harm your rankings while one solid mention from a respected site in your field does more good than all of them combined.
My honest caveat for a small business: you won’t always have the resources to vet every single link, and that’s fine. Focus your limited time on removing anything that looks obviously manipulative, and building relationships that earn a handful of strong, relevant mentions rather than trying to police every corner of the internet.
Frequently asked questions
What does a backlink look like in the actual HTML code?
It’s an anchor tag, written as <a href=”yourwebsite.com”>clickable text</a>, sitting inside a normal paragraph of another site’s page. Everything else, dofollow versus nofollow, the surrounding text, the placement on the page, is what decides whether that link is worth anything.
How do I know if a backlink is dofollow or nofollow?
Right-click the linked text on the page, choose “Inspect,” and look at the anchor tag in the code that appears. If you see rel=”nofollow” inside the tag, it’s nofollow. No such attribute usually means dofollow, though newer variants like rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc” also tell search engines not to pass full ranking value.
Do nofollow backlinks have any value at all?
Yes, just a different kind. They rarely pass direct ranking weight, but they still bring referral traffic, brand mentions, and trust signals, and a healthy backlink profile with a natural mix of both dofollow and nofollow links looks more real to Google than one that’s suspiciously all dofollow.
Can a backlink ever hurt my site instead of helping it?
Yes. Links from spammy, unrelated, or clearly low-quality sites, especially in bulk with identical anchor text, can trigger algorithmic distrust or manual penalties. I’ve personally disavowed hundreds of these for clients and watched rankings recover afterwards, which is proof enough that not every link is a good link.
