Tier 1 Backlinks Guide: Choosing the Links That Point at Your Site
Every tiered campaign lives or dies on its first layer. Tier 2 and Tier 3 can make a good Tier 1 link more visible and more trusted, but they cannot rescue a poor one. If you only have budget for one tier, spend it here.
What makes a link Tier 1
A Tier 1 backlink is any link that points straight at your own website. In practice, people reserve the label for their best placements, because these are the links Google will weigh most directly when it looks at your site.
Common Tier 1 link types:
- Guest posts on established, topically relevant blogs
- Editorial mentions earned through outreach or digital PR
- Niche edits, where a link is added to an existing article
- Links from industry associations, suppliers, partners and local organisations
- Resource page placements
Things that generally should not be Tier 1: bulk profile links, blog comments, auto-generated web 2.0 pages, and anything from a site that exists only to sell links.
How to vet a Tier 1 site
Third-party metrics like Moz's Domain Authority and Ahrefs' Domain Rating are a starting filter, not a verdict. Both can be inflated. I have seen sites with impressive scores and almost no real visitors, which usually means the score was built with the same kind of links you are trying to avoid.
Check these before agreeing to a placement:
- Organic traffic trend. Look at an SEO tool's estimated traffic over the last year or two. A steady or rising line is a good sign. A cliff often means a penalty or algorithm hit.
- Topical fit. A travel blog linking to a Goa homestay makes sense. The same blog linking to a crypto exchange, a dental clinic and a CBD shop in the same month does not.
- Outbound link patterns. Open a few recent posts. If every one carries two or three commercial links with exact-match anchors, the site is a link farm with a nice design.
- "Write for us" pages with price lists. Many legitimate sites accept guest posts. Sites that openly advertise "dofollow links, permanent, DA 50+" are the ones Google's link spam work targets first.
- Indexing. Search
site:theirdomain.comand check that recent posts appear. If Google is not indexing their new content, your link will not count either.
Which page should a Tier 1 link point to
Most people aim every Tier 1 link at their homepage or their main money page. That makes the profile look lopsided.
A better spread for a small SaaS company might be:
- Homepage, for branded and naked URL anchors
- A few feature pages, with descriptive anchors
- Two or three genuinely useful blog posts or guides, since these attract links naturally anyway
Linking to helpful content and then using internal links to pass value to commercial pages is slower but much safer than hammering one sales page.
Anchor text at Tier 1
This is where you need the most restraint. Tier 1 anchors should look like the anchors real writers use: your brand name, the bare URL, phrases like "this guide" or "their pricing page", and occasionally a partial match. Exact-match commercial anchors ("buy leather wallets online") should be rare. Run your current profile through the anchor text analyzer before adding anything, and see anchor text ratios for tiered campaigns for a fuller breakdown.
Paid Tier 1 placements and the sponsored attribute
Google's position is clear: links that are paid for should carry rel="sponsored" (introduced in 2019 alongside rel="ugc"). A paid guest post with a followed link is, by Google's definition, a link scheme. Many site owners still buy them, and many of those links are simply ignored rather than penalised, but you should know where you stand before you pay.
Ways to reduce risk if you do pay for placements:
- Prefer sites with real audiences and real editorial standards
- Keep the number of paid links small relative to links you earn
- Avoid networks that sell the same placement menu to everyone
- Never buy a batch of Tier 1 links that all go live in the same week from similar-looking sites
How many Tier 1 links you need
There is no fixed number. Look at the pages ranking for your target query and count how many referring domains they have, then aim to close the gap over months, not days. Our article on how many backlinks you need walks through that comparison.
Where to start
Make a shortlist of ten sites you would be proud to be linked from, run each through the five checks above, and drop any that fail two or more. The survivors are your Tier 1 targets. Once a few of those links are live and indexed, you can decide whether they need Tier 2 support.