Link building
Earning mentions from places that carry weight.
Links remain one of the signals search engines use to decide which sites to trust. They are also the part of SEO with the most fraud attached to it, because they are the easiest thing to sell and the hardest thing for a client to evaluate.
How does link building work without buying links?
By giving somebody a reason to mention you. In practice that means local press and community involvement, industry associations and professional directories, supplier and partner pages, sponsorships, original data or research, and being a usable source for journalists.
Buying links is a direct violation of Google's spam policies, which name exchanging money, goods or services for links that pass ranking credit. Google's position is that paid links are acceptable only when marked with a nofollow or sponsored attribute, which removes the ranking benefit the buyer was paying for.
The consequence lands on your domain rather than on the vendor who sold the links, which is the practical reason to refuse even when it is cheap.
What a link actually signals
A link from another site is a vote of a kind: somebody thought your page was worth pointing their readers at. Search engines use that signal, weighted by how much they trust the site doing the linking and how relevant it is to the subject.
Two things follow from that. First, a link from a site in your field or your area is worth far more than a link from a general site with a high score in somebody's tool. A local chamber of commerce page is more meaningful for a local business than a generic technology blog with impressive metrics.
Second, the signal only works because it is hard to fake. That is exactly why buying links is a policy violation: it converts a vote into a purchase, and search engines spend considerable effort detecting it.
The result is that legitimate link work is slow, relationship driven and partly outside your control. That is an uncomfortable sales proposition, which is why so much of this industry sells the other thing.
What Google actually prohibits
It is worth reading the spam policies rather than relying on anyone's summary, ours included. The relevant section is specific.
Prohibited: exchanging money for links or for posts containing links. Exchanging goods or services for links. Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link. Excessive link exchanges, meaning link to me and I will link to you. Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles containing links that pass ranking credit, including links with optimised anchor text in guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites.
Read the full breakdown: What Google actually prohibitsHide the full breakdown: What Google actually prohibits
Google is also explicit that buying and selling links is a normal part of the web's economy for advertising and sponsorship, and that such links are not a violation as long as they carry a nofollow or sponsored attribute. In other words, paying for a link is fine. Paying for ranking credit is not.
There are two further policies worth knowing because they affect tactics people still sell. Site reputation abuse covers third party content published on an established site primarily to exploit its ranking signals, which is what most paid placement services are. Scaled content abuse covers generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings, which is what most guest post networks produce.
What actually works for a local business
These are the tactics we use. None of them are clever, several of them are things you could do yourself, and all of them survive scrutiny.
Claim what you are already entitled to
Professional associations, licensing bodies, insurance panels, franchise and supplier locator pages, alumni directories, and industry bodies you already pay for. Most businesses are entitled to listings they have never claimed, and these are the most relevant links available to them.
Local involvement that is genuinely happening
Sponsoring a team, hosting an event, supporting a charity, offering a scholarship, participating in a chamber. The link is a by-product of something real. This is also why it works: it is difficult to fake at scale.
Be a usable source for local and trade press
Journalists need people who will answer quickly, say something specific, and be quotable. A professional who responds within an hour with a clear opinion gets used repeatedly. This is the highest value tactic on the list and it depends almost entirely on your responsiveness rather than ours.
See the remaining steps: What actually works for a local businessHide the remaining steps: What actually works for a local business
Publish something worth citing
Original data from your own business, a genuinely useful tool, a guide nobody else has written properly. This is the tactic with the highest ceiling and the longest lead time, and it only works if the thing is actually good.
Reclaim mentions that are not links
Businesses get mentioned without being linked more often than they realise. Finding those and asking is the fastest legitimate win available, because the person already decided you were worth mentioning.
Fix broken links pointing at you
Old URLs from a previous site, links to pages that moved, links with a typo. These are links you already earned and are currently wasting, and recovering them requires nobody's permission.
Notice how much of this depends on things happening inside your business rather than inside an agency. That is not an evasion, it is the nature of the work.
How to tell you are being sold bad links
If a link building proposal contains a guaranteed number of links per month at a fixed price, at least one of these applies.
- A guaranteed quantity per month. Earned links cannot be guaranteed, because they depend on other people agreeing. A guaranteed number means they are being bought or placed.
- A price list by domain authority score. Those scores are third party tool estimates, not Google metrics, and pricing by them means the links are a product.
- Guest posts on sites that publish anything, in any category, several times a day. These are content farms and Google's site reputation abuse policy addresses them directly.
- Links appearing from unrelated sites in unrelated countries. Nothing legitimate produces that pattern.
- Exact match anchor text on every new link. Natural linking produces varied anchors, mostly your business name or the page title.
See the full checklist: How to tell you are being sold bad linksHide the full checklist: How to tell you are being sold bad links
- Private blog networks, described as an exclusive network of sites. This is the tactic Google penalises most directly.
- No mention of what is being offered to the linking site in return. If nobody can explain why the other site agreed, somebody paid.
- A refusal to show you the actual links. You should be able to see every one.
The penalty for manipulative links falls on your domain, and recovering from it takes longer than building legitimately would have.
How to judge whether a link was worth anything
Ask these about any link somebody reports to you. Most bought links fail all four.
| Item | Good sign | Bad sign |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | The site is in your field or your area | The site covers everything and nothing |
| Reason | There is an obvious reason they mentioned you | No explanation anyone can give |
| Traffic | A real person might click it | Nobody will ever see it |
| Anchor | Your name or the page's actual title | A keyword phrase, every time |
The traffic question is the most useful of the four. A link nobody will ever click is a link built for a machine, and the machines are increasingly good at noticing.
How this is measured
Referring domains, meaning how many distinct sites link to you, rather than total link count. A hundred links from one site is one relationship.
The relevance and quality of those domains, assessed by looking at them rather than by a score. We would rather show you five links and explain why each one matters than report a number.
Referral traffic, which is the honest test of whether a link exists in the real world.
Then the outcome measures, which move slowly. Link work compounds over quarters and rarely shows a clean before and after, which is why it is the last thing we recommend and the first thing we would cut if a budget were tight.
One number worth ignoring: third party domain authority or domain rating scores. They are estimates produced by tools for comparison, they are not from Google, and they are the basis of nearly every dishonest link pitch.
What varies by industry
Healthcare and legal have strong institutional link sources that most practices never claim: professional bodies, licensing boards, hospital affiliations, insurance panels, bar associations and referral directories. These are highly relevant and free, and they are usually the entire first phase of the work.
Home services have fewer institutional sources and better community ones. Local sponsorship, trade associations, supplier and manufacturer locator pages, and local press coverage of actual work are where the links are.
E-commerce has the widest range and the most competition. Product reviews, gift guides and comparison content are the obvious routes, and they are also where the paid placement industry is most aggressive.
Business to business firms get the most from original data and from being quoted, because their audience reads trade publications that need sources.
What we need from you
Responsiveness. The single highest value link tactic is being a quotable source, and it depends entirely on somebody in your business replying to a journalist within the hour. We can arrange the opportunity. We cannot answer the question.
Knowledge of what you are already involved in. Sponsorships, memberships, partnerships and community activity that nobody thought to mention, because businesses rarely think of these as marketing.
Read the full breakdown: What we need from youHide the full breakdown: What we need from you
Something worth citing. Original data, a real opinion, a genuinely useful resource. We can help build it. We cannot supply the substance.
Patience, and a willingness to hear that this is the slowest part of the work with the least predictable output.
We do not publish a price for this piece of work on its own, because the right scope depends on what already exists. What is published is the bundle pricing: 2,400, 3,600 or 4,800 dollars a month depending on which channels are running. You can read the full breakdown on the pricing page, and you will get an exact number in writing before anything starts.
How this connects to the rest
Link building sits inside our SEO and GEO program and should usually be the last piece added, not the first. A site with technical problems or thin content does not benefit much from links pointing at it.
It feeds GEO more directly than it feeds ordinary SEO now, because being mentioned by sources a model reads is one of the few real influences on what an assistant says about you.
Content strategy is the prerequisite. Links are earned by things worth linking to, and building the link campaign before the asset is the usual reason these programmes fail.
For local businesses specifically, local listings work overlaps with the first phase here, since claiming the directories you are entitled to is both a consistency and a link exercise.
Find out what you are already entitled to.
Most businesses have unclaimed association, supplier and directory listings that are more relevant than anything a link vendor would sell them. We will find yours before the call.
Straight answers.
Can we just buy links? Everyone does it.
Some do, and some get away with it for a while. Google's spam policies name exchanging money, goods or services for ranking links as a violation, and the penalty applies to your domain, not to the vendor.
We will not do it. If that means we are slower than a competitor who does, we would rather tell you that up front than explain a penalty later.
How many links do we need?
There is no number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. What matters is how you compare to the sites currently ranking for the things you want, in relevance as much as in quantity.
A useful reframe: a handful of genuinely relevant links from your own field will usually do more than fifty generic ones.
Do links still matter with AI search?
Arguably more. Being cited by sources a model reads is one of the few influences anyone has on what an assistant says about a business, and citation is exactly what a link is.
The difference is that the value now shows up partly as being named in an answer rather than only as a ranking.
What about directory submissions?
The relevant ones are worth claiming: your professional association, your licensing body, your chamber, your industry's genuine directories. These double as citation consistency work.
Bulk submission to hundreds of generic directories does nothing useful and has not for a long time.
How long before links make a difference?
Quarters rather than weeks, and the effect is cumulative rather than event driven. A single link almost never produces a visible change.
This is the slowest piece of search work, which is why we sequence it after technical and content work rather than before.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google spam policies for web search (opens in a new tab)Link spam, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse.
- Google Search Essentials (opens in a new tab)What Google requires, recommends and forbids.
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Console Help (opens in a new tab)
- The FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.