Link Building

Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours. Those links are still one of the strongest signals Google uses to decide which of two similar pages deserves to rank, which is why an otherwise mediocre page with strong links routinely outranks a better page with none.

That's the whole game in two sentences. The rest of this page is about what actually earns links in practice, what gets sites penalized, and how to measure any of it without lying to yourself.

A concrete example

Say you publish a data study: you crawl 5,000 recipe sites and document how many bury the recipe under 2,000 words of life story. A journalist at a food publication cites it, three SEO newsletters pick it up, and a university lecturer adds it to a reading list. You did outreach for exactly one of those links; the other two came because the asset was worth citing. That's link building working as intended — you created the reason to link, then made sure the right people saw it.

Compare that with emailing 400 bloggers asking them to add your link to a five-year-old post "because it would be valuable for your readers." Response rate near zero, and the few takers are usually sites nobody should want a link from. Same label, completely different activity.

Tactics rated honestly

Every tactics list you'll find online rates everything "highly effective." Here's a version with the sales pitch removed:

One nuance the table can't capture: since Penguin 4.0 (2016), Google mostly devalues spammy links rather than penalizing the whole site. That made cheap link spam less dangerous but also more pointless — the most likely outcome of buying junk links today is that they simply do nothing.

How to check your links

1. Google Search Console → Links. Free and straight from Google. Check "Top linking sites" for your referring domains and "Top linked pages" to see where the equity lands. The data is sampled and delayed, but it's the only report that shows what Google itself has recorded.
2. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Free for sites you verify. Gives you the full backlink profile, new/lost links, and anchor text distribution.
3. Moz Link Explorer. The free tier allows a few queries a day — enough to spot-check a competitor.
4. Compare, don't admire. Run the same reports on the two competitors who outrank you. The gap in referring domains pointing at their money pages versus yours is your actual to-do list.
5. Check what the links pass. A chunk of any profile will be nofollow; that's normal. Only worry if nearly everything is.

Common mistakes

• Counting links instead of linking domains. 500 links from one site's footer is one vote, not 500. Judge campaigns by new referring domains. Fix: set your KPI to linking domains with real traffic.
• Building links to the homepage only. Your commercial and informational pages are the ones competing. Fix: map every campaign to a specific target URL before you pitch anyone.
• Exact-match anchor text everywhere. A profile where 40% of anchors say "best CRM software" looks manufactured because it is. Fix: let anchors fall naturally; see anchor text best practices.
• Doing outreach before you have anything linkable. No asset, no links — no matter how good the email template is. Fix: budget the asset first, the outreach second.
• Quitting at month two. Links take weeks to get crawled and months to move rankings. Fix: commit to quarters, not sprints.

Frequently asked questions

How many links do I need to rank?

There's no number. It depends entirely on what the pages currently outranking you have. Pull the referring domain counts for the top five results for your keyword; that range is your answer for that keyword, and it changes for every query.

Is link building dead now that AI search exists?

No. Links still drive classic rankings, and the citation patterns in AI answers correlate heavily with the same authority signals. What's dying is low-effort content built only to attract links — the bar for a linkable asset keeps rising.

Are nofollow links worthless?

No. Since March 2020 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, so some nofollow links may count. They also drive referral traffic and get your brand in front of people who can link with a followed link later.

Should I disavow bad links?

Almost never. Google devalues obvious spam on its own. Disavow is for sites with a manual action or a genuinely toxic history of paid links. Random spam links pointing at your site are background noise every site has.

Can I just do internal linking instead?

Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever most sites ignore, and you should absolutely fix them — but they redistribute authority you already have. External links are how you get more of it. You need both.