Tier 1 Backlinks: What They Are And How To Build Them?

Backlinks are the links that come from another website to your website and that can be a dofollow or nofollow link. A do-follow link is a link that passes all the link equity and a nofollow link is a link that does not pass any link juice and is meant to show off.

Now, why I am telling you about do-follow and nofollow links? Because it directly relates to the tiered link-building strategy or tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 backlinks.


But as the number goes on the quality of links gradually decreases. It could be too confusing as in short, tiered link building is all about Building backlinks for your backlinks.

What Is Tiered Link Building?

As I said before tearing building is all about building backlinks for your backlinks. But, there are 3 different stages of these links.


The first one is the first-tier backlink or TIer 1 link which is the highest quality backlink that passes link equity and points directly to your website.


The second one is tier 2 backlinks which are a bit low-quality backlinks that can be dofollow or nofollow backlinks and will point directly to your tier 1 backlink.


The third-tier backlinks or Tier 3 backlinks are beyond the quality standards, they can be of any type, mostly nofollow and can be spammy and blackhat. The ultimate target to build these types of links is to increase the power or page authority of tier 2 and tier 1 pages so that they can pass more link juice to your website and increase your authority and rankings.


So, now, let’s know about the tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 backlinks. What are they, the ambition behind building them, and everything from scratch?


Tier 1 Backlinks

As I said before high quality tier 1 backlinks are the backlinks that do follow and come from the standard 1 referring pages from other highly authoritative websites. These backlinks pass all the link juice and significantly help in increasing your page authority, domain authority, and above all, the ultimate target, rankings.


These backlinks are usually contextual links that have come maybe for a mention on another website or something like that. Tier 1 backlinks include:

Guest posting backlinks

The backlinks that you acquire through posting on other authoritative blogs as a guest in a mindset to get contextual links or backlinks. But don't be too smart to save time. If you give the same title as the article that is published on your website that performs well in SERPs then your ranking post will be deranked. These are called Duplicate title tags and if you copy the meta description then it is called duplicate meta description tags. (I have written a complete article about how to remove duplicate title tags in Wordpress in my blog. If you want check that out.)

Editorially acquired backlinks from authoritative blogs or media

Let’s say you have created a super informative piece of content or super informative info-graphics and authoritative blogs in your industry have mentioned you and given you a backlink. That’s called an editorial link or natural link that you get organically to your articles,

Citation links

Citation links are the links that tell google that your newborn website is worth indexing and ranking in SERPs. These links include local directory, business directory, web directory, social bookmarking, and others like business listing.

Quality web 2.0 backlinks

Web 2.0 links are the links that you get from your websites. Maybe that is from a blog. But when it’s your private blog, you are the king of your blog, it’s called a PBN or Private blog network. But web 2.0 and PBN both violate google’s link schemes.

Resource page backlinks

Sometimes blogs and websites make a page listing some of the most valuable informative pages in their industry or niche. Maybe if they are a local cake dealer, it would build up a resource page listing all the cake providers in their area. This is just an example.

Question answering backlinks

Question answers are also worth including in the list of Tier 2 backlinks. I don’t mean any other forums or question-answer sites that have a low domain authority and a high spam score. I am talking about quora. You can build links on other forums that are authoritative and relevant to your niche. But quora is covering all the niches making it easier for each industry to acquire contextual links from quora. Maybe that can be nofollow, but that’s contextual.

Tier 2 Backlinks

Tier 2 backlinks are those backlinks that point to tier 1 backlink pages. The goal behind building these backlinks for the tier 1 backlinks is that first of all, the tier 2 links are usually not that quaityful means may be dofollow or nofollow and sometimes a bit spammy. However, if they pass a little link juice to tier 1 pages then the tier 1 pages will pass that to your main page.


So, where is the benefit? It is that you are building low-quality backlinks in less time and effort that can be spammy and nofollow. But the spammy links will not directly affect your site. It will affect the tier 1 link pages and ultimately the link juice will get transferred to your website.


This means you will get only good effects of backlinks both good and bad.


These tier 2 backlinks include: 

Profile creation backlinks

Profile creation backlinks are those backlinks that you build in your created profile of a website. And the website can be anything from health to digital marketing. It’s best to create profiles only on niche-relevant sites and build backlinks.


But as I said, tier 2 backlinks are second-class links. If they pass a bit of link juice, that’s great. That’s why we all build profile backlinks on every and each website that allows us to create public profiles and include a personal website, company website, or hyperlink in our profile bio.

Article Directories

Article directories are those website directories where people submit random articles about various topics and the websites never approve them. Most of the time obviously! 


I have tried almost 100 article directories by submitting my own handwritten quality articles but I got nothing from those sites. But, obviously, some sites accept instant approval and have actually high DA. If you can find a great one.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is done by bookmarking or submitting your links to a particular that is made for receiving and listing with a little bit of information about the link like the page title, description, contact information of the owner, and so on.


Google crawls these websites to find something new that’s unknown to it. But the crawl rate of these sites is actually low that’s why the indexation time is too long

Free Guest Posts

I am not talking about those guest posts that you have gotten through contacting the owner of the blog, pitching your post, paying him for your article, and finally getting a backlink.


I am talking about those sites which are generally niche and allow everyone in the whole world to just register and post articles to the website.


The main difference between article directories and free guest posts is that most of the time your articles get unpublished in directories but for free guest posts, your article gets published with a dofollow or nofollow link within it in the blog. The best part is that the approval time is no longer than 12 to 24 hours. So, good than others. But always try to focus on the quality of your articles. Because google love quality content

Tier 3 Backlinks

Tier 3 backlinks are those backlinks that are not so qualityful and may be spammy and the referring domains may not contain such good domain authority as the tier 2 and tier 1 sites.


These backlinks are most of the time spammy, made automatically or manually. The ultimate goal behind building these backlinks is to increase the page authority of tier 2 and tier 1 linking pages so that they can transfer the most link juice and increase your page authority.


These links include:


Blog Comments

Blog comment backlinks are those backlinks that are earned by commenting on relevant or irrelevant blog articles. It would be best if you can use only relevant blogs to build backlinks but as I said before, on tier 2 backlinks, we created profile backlinks on any type or any niche websites may be which can be WordPress and blogger.


The same strategy applies here. As these are tier 3 backlinks the linking sites can be relevant or irrelevant that do not matter. Most of the time the sites can be irrelevant.


Like the tier 2 backlinks the ultimate goal is to get a little link juice to the tier 2 and tier 3 backlinks so that your target page can get the most out of this link-building strategy.


Blogspot Linking

It’s another type of link building that is made by posting relevant articles on blogspot sites or sites made by a CMS called blogger. Blogger is a free-to-use platform made by Google that helps us to immediately create a blog website for completely free with a lifetime free subdomain. 


But here in this case, you have to build your own blogspot website and then post relevant articles on the blog. You can use an AI writer in this case. But handwritten articles are golden.


So, this is a basic idea of what is tier 1 backlinks, tier 2 backlinks, and tier 3 backlinks. Just remember, if you have gotten a good website that has a spam score of <10 and has a high domain authority then links it directly to the target website. But if you have a site that has a high spam score and a medium to low domain authority then link to that high domain authority page.


Now, let’s know about the benefits and drawbacks.


Benefits of Tiered link building

Less risk for your website

Google has declared clearly that if a website has good high-quality backlinks then google will surely rank it in the top 10 and if it has low-quality spammy links then google will surely ban or ignore the whole backlink profile. Which means no ranking.


So, you might be thinking that only tier 1 is the best and tier 2 is moderate. But tier 3 is the worst and is hated by Google. So, why did we build it? The main reason behind this is that tier 3, however, the worst backlinks share a bit of link juice but increase the domain spam score as well, which is a metric that tells us how spammy a domain's backlinks profile is.


The worst backlinks point to the better ones and the better ones point to the best ones and the best ones point to the main website. This means the link juice comes from the worst ones to the better ones, then the total link juice of the better ones and worst ones comes to the best ones and the best ones give all the total link juice to the main website.


This means you will get only the good thing, link juice not the spam score. And google can’t understand this whole process, usually, If you can do it properly. Otherwise, google can easily understand it as google is so smart nowadays.


Increased Domain and Page Authority

As in tiered link building, the link juice passes from one stage to another one, and you get all the link juice from different types of links and websites to your website. This helps a lot because as you get link juice, the domain authority or page authority continuously increases.


Page authority is a metric that you can use to know how authoritative the backlink profile of your page is and domain authority, which is indirectly increasing overtime when your page authority gradually increases, is a method that you can use to know how qualityful or authoritative your domain's backlinks profile is.


Some SEOs give special services for increasing domain and page authority. Through doing this tiered link-building strategy you can easily increase your domain and page authority.


Having Control Over Spam Score

The spam score is a metric that allows us to understand how spammy our domain's backlink profile is. It is maintained by Moz. Google rankings do not have direct connections with it like if you have a spam score of 3 you will get this ranking, but not like that.


But it has indirect connections. The less your backlinks profile is spammy the higher your chance will be to rank on google.


At the beginning of any website, webmasters just become mad to build some new backlinks for their website, and to do that, they build backlinks on spammy low quality websites which results in low domain authority and high spam scores. Through tiered link building you can avoid the bad part of links and can only get the good parts, the link juice. Which results in a low spam score and a high domain authority.


Drawbacks of Tiered Link Building

More Time Consuming

To build these backlinks you have spare a lot of time. Think of it, you have to write articles to build tier 1 backlinks, then you have to build the tier 2 ones, and then tier 3 ones. A lot of work. And moreover, if you are a blogger, you also have to carry over the blog.


This is one of the major drawbacks of tiered link building ever. If you have time to do then it’s best, otherwise tiered link building is not for you/.


Risk Of Penalties

Obviously, if you can do it properly then nothing will happen. But, still, it’s a manipulation of Google’s search algorithm and if google can catch it, a significant part of your total backlink profile can be ignored or banned or deindexed the whole site.


So, whatever you do, beware of it.


However, Tiered link-building SEO strategy is a time-consuming process and has several significant drawbacks but the best part is it can actually help you in ranking. Do this today and see what happens. Thanks for reading.