Oh, I also forgot to add another thing I do for contextual links.
Remember this isn't a "do this and you succeed, don't do it and you're flagged". It's very very likely now machine learning looking at everything. It's very likely there's very few set ranking factors these days, and the constant updates are re-trains of the machine learning which would make sense. The amount of updates are INSANE, and they didn't used to do that many. They used to be every 2-3 years, then yearly, then twice a year, now they're every 2-3 months.
The extra thing to do with all your contextual links is to avoid these spammy patterns you'll often see the most with cheap guest posts and pbns. "Why you should choose a plumber in NYC", then it contains a single link, even worse with an anchor "plumber nyc" lol.
Choose a title that's NOT directly related to the page you're linking to. This is actually not common with real links. Why would someone creating a page about forks, link to another page about forks? Sometimes yes, but now multiply this and all your contextuals are fork pages, linking to your fork page. And then people wonder why they got smashed with the Dec 14 spambrain update.
If your page is about forks, your article should be about a related topic. Dinner table etiquette, kitchen topics, food topics, cooking topics.
It also depends on the topic. If you're linking to a persian cat training page, you can have an article about persian cats, but don't have an article about persian cat training. Or, have an article about training cats in general. Always something a little off to the left.
Add internal links to your backlink. Harder for guest posts, but you can ask.
Add another 2-3 external links to the article. You will NOT dilute the power. This is not 2010 ;-)
Add 1-2 internal link FROM the article. Ie, link to a couple of other internal pages. This, again, is a sign of a real article.
An article that's not real will have 1-2 links, no internal links to it, no internal links from it.
