Link building
What is link building?
Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours. Each link acts as a vote: search engines read it as a sign that somebody thought the page worth pointing at. Who links matters far more than how many — one link from a trade publication outweighs a hundred from directories built only to sell links. Buying links that pass ranking weight breaks Google’s spam policies.
Example
A small winery has 14 sites linking to it, nine of them business directories. Instead of buying a package of links, it does four things over six months:
- publishes data nobody else has — harvest by year, grape and sugar content, in a table;
- gives an interview and photographs to two food and wine publications;
- gets listed on the region’s tourist maps and by its trade association;
- sponsors a local festival and is linked from its site, marked as a sponsor.
By the end it has 31 links from 22 different domains, nearly all of them on sites that people actually read. The difference is not the number; it is that every link has a reason to exist.
Why it matters for a business
Links remain one of the few judgements about a site that you do not write yourself. They count in ranking, and they count with the person who found you inside an article rather than an advert. An inbound link also brings visits directly, and those visitors arrive with a recommendation already in hand.
The risk is the shortcut. A “100 links” package is recognisable: the same sites, the same wording in every link, no readers anywhere. Google’s spam policies on link schemes are explicit, and clearing up after a manual action takes months. A paid placement is not forbidden in itself — it has to be marked as paid, so that it passes no ranking weight.
How to improve it
- Make something that deserves a link: data, a tool, a guide that does not exist yet in your language.
- Find the places that already talk about you — mentions without links, associations, suppliers, customers.
- Look at who links to competitors, and why.
- Mark sponsored and paid links as such.
- Count domains, not links: 20 sites say more than 200 links from one.
Buying packages is no part of the SEO work we run; the technical work and the content that make a site worth linking to are.