Google uses links to discover pages and to judge how relevant they are. The anchor text tells it what the target page is about, and Google's documentation adds that the words before and after a link matter too. A link in the middle of a paragraph about your topic carries far more information than a lone link in a footer or a list of partners.

There's a trust side as well. Google's spam policies name widely distributed links in the footers or templates of many sites as link spam. A link an author chose because it helps their readers is the opposite of that pattern.

  • A site close to your topic. A link from a recipe blog to accounting software has no credible context.
  • A page that's alive. Indexed, read by real people, and written for readers rather than to host links.
  • Natural anchor text. Your brand name, your URL or a phrase that describes your page. The same exact-match anchor on every link looks engineered.
  • A link people would click. If a reader of the article would never follow it, it isn't doing the job a contextual link should do.
  • Publish things others cite: original data, studies, free tools, reference guides.
  • Answer journalists' requests and offer expert commentary.
  • Write guest posts for sites in your industry, aimed at their readers.
  • Find unlinked mentions of your brand and ask the author to add a link.

Google accepts that buying links is a normal part of advertising and sponsorship on the web. But a paid link must carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Without one, Google treats it as link spam. Since its July 2021 link spam update, Google says it nullifies those links, and it may apply manual or algorithmic actions to sites that publish or acquire excessive sponsored or guest posts without proper link tags.

Common mistakes

  • Chasing volume. Low-quality directory and bookmark links are on Google's list of link spam.
  • Swapping links at scale. Excessive link exchanges ("link to me and I'll link to you") are on the same list.
  • Dropping links in comments. Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature are treated the same way.
  • Forcing the anchor. An anchor that doesn't fit the sentence loses the one thing that makes a contextual link valuable: its context.

Example

You make scheduling software for restaurants. A hospitality trade publication runs a piece on managing kitchen shifts. In the paragraph about overtime, the journalist links to your guide on the subject with the anchor "restaurant overtime rules explained". The link sits inside text about your topic, was chosen by the author, and appears on a site your customers read: that's a contextual backlink. The same link in a "Our partners" block in the footer would carry almost no context.