You used to worry about how many links you had.
In 2025, the real question is how clearly your backlinks prove that you are the right answer for a topic.
Google’s models do not see backlinks as simple votes anymore. They interpret each link as a tiny claim about your experience, expertise, and trustworthiness. That is why link relevance SEO has become the main lens for judging link quality. If a link does not make sense to a human reading the page, it probably will not impress an AI model either.
In this guide, you will see how Google’s AI systems read backlinks in context, how EEAT link building changes what “quality” means, and how to build a stronger link profile that actually compounds. The goal is simple. Fewer, better, safer links that move rankings instead of bloating your graph with noise and risk.
Why Link Relevance Matters More Than Link Volume Now
For a long time, link building was a numbers game. Get more referring domains, push more exact match anchors, and hope the graph carried you up page one.
That era is fading fast.
Today, the strongest outcomes come from a small set of highly relevant placements that fit your topical footprint and audience. A handful of clean links on real, trusted sites can outperform hundreds of generic placements. Teams that were chasing volume are now pouring budget into a smaller number of carefully chosen opportunities and into building a much stronger link profile instead of spraying links everywhere.
You can think of modern link value as a simple tiered reality.
- Links on non indexed pages are almost always wasted effort
- Links on indexed but non ranking pages have some value, but often little traffic or proof behind them
- Links from pages that already rank and earn clicks are much stronger
- Links from pages that rank for your own target topics, with visible engagement, are the closest thing you get to a “gold tier” placement
The deeper point is not the labels. It is the environment around the link. Google’s systems want to see links inside content that is already useful, trusted, and clearly about your subject. That is why link relevance SEO is the first filter you should apply before you even look at a metric.
What Link Relevance Means In SEO In 2025
Relevance can sound vague. In practice, it breaks down into clear layers you can check every time you look at a prospect.
Domain, Page, And Section Level Relevance
First is the domain itself.
Is this site clearly serving the same or an adjacent audience as you? A marketing analytics blog linking to a marketing data tool makes sense. A random celebrity gossip site linking to that same tool rarely does.
Second is the specific page.
Does the article talk about the same problems, entities, and intent as your target page? A post on technical SEO referencing your guide to crawlability is a strong match. A thin “SEO quotes” listicle linking to that same guide is far weaker.
Third is the section around your link.
The one to three paragraphs surrounding your link should make it obvious why the reference is there. If someone can read that block without understanding why you are mentioned, the relevance is probably weak.
Anchor And User Relevance
Anchor text is no longer about hitting an exact phrase.
It is about whether a short snippet of language fairly describes what the user will get when they click.
“Diagnostic steps for ranking volatility” linking into a volatility guide is a good match. “Best SEO service ever” pointing to the same guide is noisy. The first sets a clear expectation. The second reads like an ad, not an editorial reference.
User relevance is the final sanity check.
Ask yourself a simple question. If you were the average reader of that paragraph, would you actually want to click this link? If the honest answer is no, the link is unlikely to impress Google’s systems either.
How AI Models Read These Layers Together
Google’s models process these layers at the same time. They do not see an anchor in isolation. They read the title, headings, paragraph, anchor, and destination page, and compare that bundle to known topics and entities in your niche.
Google’s own guide on creating helpful, reliable, people first content explains that ranking systems are built to prioritise information that is genuinely useful to people, not content created only to manipulate signals. Links that sit inside genuinely helpful explanations fit that expectation much better than isolated keyword plugs.
That is why placements that feel obvious and natural to a human tend to perform better than clever but forced insertions. The models are very good at spotting when a link is part of a real explanation and when it is simply pushed into a sentence.
Inside Google’s AI Stack: How Models Judge Backlink Context
You do not need to know every detail of BERT, MUM, RankBrain, or SpamBrain to build good links. You do need to understand what they care about.
BERT And MUM As The Context Layer
BERT helped Google read language in both directions, so the words before and after your anchor matter as much as the anchor itself. MUM takes this further by understanding topics and intent across multiple documents and even multiple languages.
Together, they:
- Read the full sentence and surrounding paragraph
- Map the words to entities and topics
- Compare the source and destination pages for alignment
- Decide whether the link is a natural part of the explanation
This is why keyword stuffed anchors with no supporting context are so weak. The model sees the mismatch between the words, the sentence, and the landing page.
RankBrain As The Behavior Feedback Loop
RankBrain is widely understood as one of the components that helps Google adjust results based on how people interact with them. The same idea applies at the link level.
If a placement sends you referral traffic that:
- Clicks through at a healthy rate
- Spends time reading your content
- Visits other pages or converts
then that pattern reinforces the idea that this link connects two pages in a useful way. If most users bounce within seconds or never scroll, that link is not teaching the system anything positive about relevance.
A link that no one clicks is a weak signal. A link that sends highly engaged visitors is a clear vote that the connection makes sense.
SpamBrain As The Safety Net
SpamBrain is Google’s AI based spam prevention system that now hunts link schemes as well as spammy content. Search Central’s spam policies for Google web search spell out the kinds of manipulative behaviour that can lead to devaluation or removal from results, including link schemes and abusive patterns.
SpamBrain looks for patterns.
Sudden bursts of identical anchors. Networks of domains with shared templates and weak content. Links appearing only in footers and sidebars. High volumes of off topic links into a small set of domains.
When your profile looks like that, links are quietly neutralized. The main defense is not secrecy. It is staying inside patterns that match natural editorial behaviour and genuine EEAT link building instead of industrial link production.
EEAT Link Building: How EEAT Criteria Apply To Your Backlinks
EEAT often sounds abstract. In the context of link evaluation, it becomes very concrete.
Experience And Real World Proof
Experience shows up when a piece of content speaks in specifics instead of generic summaries.
If an article links to your guide and says “after applying this approach, our organic leads increased by 40 percent over three months,” that is a clear sign of first hand use. If it only repeats definitions anyone could copy, experience is thin.
Links from content that shows lived experience with your topic are stronger than links from shallow explainers. They help Google’s systems connect your brand to real world practice, not just theory.
Expertise And Author Profiles
Expertise is easier to judge when authors are visible.
Named authors with a consistent track record on a topic send a stronger signal than anonymous posts written by “the team.” When that author has detailed bios, appears on other reputable sites, or is cited in industry discussions, each link from their work carries more weight.
This is where EEAT link building starts to look different in practice. You are not only chasing placements on “high DR” domains. You are prioritising articles written by people who are recognised experts in your space, and you are trying to become one of those people yourself.
Authoritativeness, Trust, And The Guidelines Behind Them
Authoritativeness comes from patterns of recognition.
When multiple respected sites in your niche mention and link to you, often in the same breath as other known brands, models can see that network. Over time, your brand starts to look like part of that trusted cluster for a topic.
Trustworthiness adds another layer. Transparent authorship, accurate citations, clear disclosures, secure sites, and regularly updated content all make a domain safer to trust. A link from that kind of site is a stronger endorsement than one from a thin, ad stuffed blog that rarely updates.
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines explain how human raters are asked to use E E A T as a lens when judging reliability and usefulness, which then feeds back into how systems are refined. Your link building choices can either align with that lens or fight against it.
Entities, Topical Authority, And Link Relevance SEO
Google does not only see keywords. It sees entities and relationships.
How Google Maps Entities And Relationships
An entity is a person, brand, product, place, or clear concept. When a linking article mentions your brand, your product category, and the specific problem you solve, those entities can be mapped together.
If your page is clearly about the same entities, the link is reinforcing that relationship. If the entities clash, the link looks random or manufactured.
Topic Clusters And The Cluster Effect On Links
Topical authority is easier to understand if you think in clusters.
Imagine you have ten strong pieces on one theme, all internally linked in a clean way. When you earn a relevant link into any one of those pages, that authority can support the rest of the cluster. Google’s systems see a body of work, not just a one off article.
This is where internal and external linking work together. Internal links spread relevance and authority around your cluster. External links bring in new trust and visibility. A coherent cluster backed by truly relevant backlinks is far stronger than a collection of disconnected posts with random links pointed at them.
AI Driven Link Spam Detection And Safety Thresholds
Modern spam systems do not only punish obvious spam. They also strip value from large batches of links that simply do not look natural.
Patterns That Trigger Neutralisation
Some patterns are particularly risky:
- High percentages of exact match money anchors
- Sudden waves of links with nearly identical wording
- Many links from sites that cover unrelated topics
- Networks of sites that share templates, writing styles, and outbound targets
You can often see these patterns in your own reports. When too many rows look the same, or when most of your new links come from sites your audience would never read, you probably have a relevance problem, not just a volume problem.
Link Velocity And Explainable Growth
Velocity by itself is not the enemy.
The issue is whether growth looks explainable.
If a brand launches a large study and earns mentions across hundreds of news and industry sites over a week, that spike fits the story. If a local service site gets a sudden wave of blog sidebar links from unrelated domains, that spike looks different.
The key is to line up content, PR, and outreach so that your link curve tells a believable story. When your growth patterns match real world activity, you are less likely to trip AI based spam detectors.
Toxic Backlinks, Disavow, And Moving On
At some point, you will find bad links in your profile. Some may be legacy link building. Some may be automated spam you never asked for.
The safest response is:
- Focus new effort on earning high relevance, high trust links
- Remove what you can by contacting site owners
- Use disavow only for clearly harmful patterns or when you face a manual action
If you need a deeper process, you can borrow from the kind of workflow laid out in an in depth toxic backlinks audit and disavow guide, where the emphasis is on pattern level clean up rather than chasing individual links.
Once SpamBrain has neutralised a batch of links, that value is gone. The fastest path forward is almost always to outgrow and outweigh bad signals with a cleaner, more relevant footprint.
Anchor Text Strategy In The AI And EEAT Era
Anchor text is still a lever, but it works differently when models read language instead of strings.
From Exact Match To Semantic Description
In older playbooks, hitting your exact keyword in as many anchors as possible was the goal. Now, that usually creates a risk pattern.
Instead, think about anchors as small, honest descriptions of the destination. “Link relevance signals in modern SEO” is better than “link relevance SEO” repeated ten times in a row. The meaning is clear, the text reads naturally, and the models can still connect it to the main topic.
Building A Healthy Anchor Profile
A healthy profile usually includes:
- Branded anchors that reinforce your name
- Descriptive anchors that mirror how people naturally talk
- Neutral anchors and URL anchors that show organic variety
If your reports show that most new links use the same money phrase, you have a problem. If they show a mix that reflects real language, you are much closer to what Google expects.
A dedicated anchor text strategy for 2025 makes this easier to operationalise. You can brief outreach and content partners to use natural phrases, while still covering your core concepts over time.
Anchors As Mini Promises To Users
Every anchor is a promise.
If you promise a checklist and deliver a sales page, users bounce and the models notice. If you promise a walkthrough and deliver a detailed guide, users stay and explore.
That is why you should read anchors out loud when reviewing prospects. If they sound like something you would actually say in conversation, you are on the right track. If they sound like they were written for a bot, they probably were.
Brand Mentions, Unlinked Citations, And AI Search
Not every mention comes with a link. That does not make it worthless.
How Unlinked Mentions Feed Entity Recognition
When your brand is mentioned in industry roundups, interviews, or conference recaps, those citations still help systems understand who you are and what you are connected to.
Over time, repeated mentions in the same topical neighbourhood tell models that you belong in that space. That supports both EEAT and entity recognition, even if only a fraction of mentions are clickable links.
Turning Mentions Into Contextually Strong Links
You can also convert a portion of these mentions into full backlinks.
A simple process looks like this:
- Track new mentions of your brand across news, blogs, and social
- Identify mentions where a link would genuinely help readers find more detail
- Reach out quickly with a short, specific request that explains why a link adds value
Because those pages already talk about you in a relevant way, upgrades from mention to link tend to be highly contextual and safe.
Mentions, LLMs, And AI Overviews
Large language models and AI enriched search experiences often rely heavily on source brands that appear again and again in trusted content. Even when a specific mention does not include a link, it still contributes to that overall footprint.
From a practical standpoint, this means that PR, thought leadership, and link building are all part of the same game. You are not only collecting backlinks. You are building a recognisable entity that AI systems feel comfortable citing.
User Engagement As A Link Quality Multiplier
A link that looks perfect on paper but sends no useful traffic is a weak investment.
Referral Traffic Quality As A Ranking Hint
You do not need special access to see whether a placement is doing its job. Analytics already tells you:
- How many users come through a specific link
- How long they stay
- How many pages they view
- Whether they sign up, buy, or contact you
Those patterns matter. When users coming from a particular site stay longer and act more often, that link is not just a theoretical vote. It is a real bridge between two audiences.
The Engagement Authority Feedback Loop
When you consistently earn links that send engaged visitors, you create a loop.
- Better links drive better referral traffic
- Better engagement strengthens your perceived relevance
- Stronger relevance supports better rankings
- Higher rankings make you more interesting to journalists and partners
- That interest becomes more quality links
You do not see this in a single week. You do see it over quarters when you stop chasing cheap links and start treating every placement as a chance to connect real people to genuinely useful content.
A Practical EEAT Link Building Playbook For 2025
With all of this in mind, you can reshape your link building approach so that it makes sense to both humans and models.
Content Led Link Earning
Start with a small set of assets that genuinely deserve attention.
That usually means original research, deep explainers, practical frameworks, or tools that save people time. These are the pages that other sites will feel comfortable referencing when they talk to their own audience.
Make sure these assets sit inside clear topic clusters and are linked well internally, in the same spirit as a white hat link building process that stresses long term safety. That way, any external link they earn also supports surrounding pages.
Relationship Driven Outreach
Most high quality links come from conversations, not from mass emails.
Building a small network of editors, journalists, and practitioners in your space takes time, but it pays off. When they know you as a reliable source of insights, they are more likely to link to your work, invite you into roundups, and ask for your take on new developments.
The goal is to be the person they think of when they need a quote, a case study, or a clear explanation. Links then follow naturally from that trust.
Topical Authority And Cluster Planning
Pick a few topics where you want to be the default answer.
Plan your content so that each topic becomes a cluster of related pages, not a single article. Use internal links to connect those pages clearly. Then target external links into the cluster in a way that mirrors how people naturally discover information.
Over time, that combination of cluster structure and high relevance backlinks is what makes you look like a true authority instead of just another site with a few lucky links.
Recovery And Recalibration After Link Problems
If you suspect that past link building is holding you back, treat recovery as a focused project.
Audit your profile, find obvious risk pockets, and decide where to remove, where to disavow, and where to simply stop investing energy. At the same time, launch one or two small, tightly controlled EEAT aligned campaigns so that new, clean links start arriving while you fix the old issues.
The point is not to erase history overnight. It is to change the direction of your graph so that every new month looks safer and more relevant than the last.
Metrics That Actually Reflect Link Relevance And Safety
Finally, you need a way to measure progress without getting lost in scores.
Authority Metrics As Dashboards, Not Targets
Metrics like Domain Authority, Domain Rating, Authority Score, and Trust Flow can be useful as quick snapshots. They are not the goal.
Use them to:
- Spot big changes in your profile
- Compare relative strength between potential partners
- Monitor general progress over time
Do not use them as justification for irrelevant links. A “high authority” domain that has nothing to do with your topic is not a good fit, no matter what the score says.
Relevance And Context Metrics
For link relevance SEO, better metrics are:
- Percentage of new referring domains that clearly sit in your topical neighbourhood
- Share of new links that come from pages with real organic traffic
- Ratio of contextual in content links to footers, sidebars, and directories
Those numbers show whether your profile is getting sharper and more focused, not just bigger.
A classic article on Topical SEO and link relevance concepts reinforces this shift from counting links to understanding how they support people first answers.
Safety And Stability Indicators
On the safety side, you can track:
- Volume and trend of clearly spammy links you have to neutralise
- Anchor distributions over time
- How rankings respond to major spam and core updates
Stable or improving rankings through volatile periods is one of the strongest signs that your link profile makes sense to Google’s systems. It means you are working with the models, not betting against them.
Building A Backlink Profile That Makes Sense To AI
In 2025, every backlink you earn is a small story about who you are, what you know, and whether people should trust you.
Google’s models read that story at multiple levels. They look at link relevance SEO across domains, pages, sections, anchors, entities, and behaviour. They check whether the content around your link shows real experience and expertise. They consider whether the source looks like part of a trustworthy network for your topic.
The winning pattern is not complicated. Create work that genuinely deserves citations. Place links where they clearly help readers. Prioritise EEAT aligned sources and authors. Avoid shortcuts that only look good inside a spreadsheet.
If you do that consistently, your EEAT link building efforts stop feeling like a gamble and start feeling like a compounding asset. You earn placements that stay valuable through updates, reinforce your brand as an authority, and help AI powered experiences choose you as a source.
If you want help designing that kind of link strategy, you can always book a planning call and walk through your current profile with a specialist, or you can go deeper and start a managed SEO program that bakes link relevance and EEAT into your monthly campaigns.
