Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours. Links remain one of Google's strongest ranking signals, but only a fraction of them count.
Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours. Links are still one of Google’s strongest ranking signals, but they now do a second job: AI search tools use citations and mentions across the web to decide which brands to name.
The catch is that most links are worth nothing. Volume stopped working as a strategy well over a decade ago.
Why links carry weight
Google’s original insight was that a link is a vote. A page linked to by many trusted pages is probably worth reading. 25 years of spam later, the system is far more careful about which votes it counts, but the principle holds. In competitive markets, the difference between page one and page four is usually authority rather than content quality, because everyone on page one has already written a decent page.
What makes a link worth having
- Relevance. A link from a trade publication your customers read is worth more than one from a general news site with a bigger audience. Topical fit is the first filter.
- Editorial placement. A link inside the body of an article, added because it was useful, beats a link in a footer, a sidebar or an author bio.
- Real traffic. If a site has an audience, its links tend to hold value. Domain authority scores are estimates built by third parties, not something Google reads.
- Anchor text that reads naturally. A pattern of exact match commercial anchors across dozens of sites is one of the easiest footprints to spot.
Tactics that still work
Digital PR does most of the heavy lifting now. That means making something a journalist actually wants: original data from your own systems, a survey with a real sample, a piece of analysis nobody else has run. Pitch it to the publications your buyers read and the links arrive as a byproduct of the coverage.
A few other methods stay reliable. Responding to journalist requests puts named experts from your business into national coverage, often within days. Unlinked brand mentions are the cheapest wins available: find the places that already name you and ask for the link. Supplier, partner and trade body listings take an afternoon and last for years. Contributed articles work when the publication has editorial standards and are worthless when it will publish anything.
This is the bulk of what our digital PR team does, and the honest version of it is slow. A campaign that lands 15 links from publications your customers read will beat 400 directory submissions by a wide margin.
What to stay away from
Buying links breaches Google’s spam policies, and the risk has changed shape. Rather than issuing a manual penalty, Google now tends to quietly discount the links, so you pay for something that does nothing at all. Private blog networks, large-scale link exchanges, comment and forum spam, and bulk guest posting on sites that exist only to sell links all sit in the same bucket. Where a link is sponsored or user generated, mark it with rel sponsored or rel ugc and move on.
Common questions
How many links do I need?
There is no fixed number. Look at the referring domains pointing to the pages currently ranking for your target terms and work from that gap. In a low-competition local market, it might be a dozen. In finance or insurance, it can be hundreds.
How long until links affect rankings?
Weeks to months. Google has to crawl the linking page and recalculate, and the effect builds as links accumulate rather than arriving in one step. Judge a campaign over two quarters, not two weeks.
Do nofollow links have any value?
Yes, just not directly. Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than an instruction, and nofollowed coverage still drives referral traffic, brand searches and the citations AI search tools pull from. A national publication that nofollows everything is still worth pitching.
If you want the compressed definition, link building sits in our SEO glossary alongside the related terms.
