Link building: what earns links now, and how to tell if one is worth anything

Links are earned by publishing something a writer in your field would want to cite, then telling the small number of people who write about that subject. The single test for any link is whether a relevant person could plausibly click it and be glad they did. A link that passes that test is worth having; one that exists only to be counted is a liability, because Google defines link spam as creating links primarily to manipulate rankings and lists the common tactics by name.

This page covers what the policies say, the five assets that reliably attract citations, how digital PR works as a process, and a one minute test for judging a link.

What the policies actually say

Google's spam policies define link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings," and the listed examples are specific. They include buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, automated link generation, requiring a link as a contract term without allowing a nofollow, text ads and native advertising that pass ranking credit, low quality directory and bookmark links, keyword rich links in distributed widgets, site wide footer and template links across domains, forum comments with optimised anchor text, and creating low value content primarily to build links.

The same page sets out the legitimate route, noting that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy when the links are marked correctly. Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links gives three values: sponsored for advertisements and paid placements, ugc for user generated content such as comments and forum posts, and nofollow when none of the others apply and you would rather Google not associate your site with the linked page.

Read together, the rule is easy to work with: pay for attention if you want to, label it, and never pay for ranking credit.

Five things that reliably earn links

• Original data from your own operations. You hold numbers nobody else can publish: what your customers ask for, how long things take, what proportion of jobs hit a given problem. Publish them with the method and the date, and writers in your field cite them because there is no other source.
• A tool that does one job properly. A calculator, a checker, a generator, a template. These accumulate links for years because people link to the thing that saved them twenty minutes.
• A definitive reference page. The page that settles a recurring question in your sector, kept updated with a visible date. These earn links quietly and indefinitely.
• A clear position from a credible practitioner. Not an opinion piece, but a specific argument with evidence and a cost attached, written by somebody who does the work. Writers cite the person who said it first and said it precisely.
• Genuine local and sector participation. Sponsoring something real, speaking, running an event, publishing research with a trade body, serving on a panel. The coverage that follows is editorial, which is exactly the kind that counts.

Digital PR, as a process

Step	What it is	The usual mistake
Pick the story	One finding that a reader would repeat to a colleague	Leading with the product instead of the finding
Build the evidence	Your own data, a survey you ran, or a public dataset analysed in a new way	A survey with a sample too small or too narrow to say anything
Write the asset	A page with the numbers, the method, the charts and quotable lines	Publishing a PDF, which nobody can link into or quote from easily
Build the list	Twenty to fifty named writers who have covered this exact subject in the last year	A purchased list of thousands, which produces nothing and burns the domain
Pitch individually	Three sentences: what you found, why it matters to their readers, where the data is	A long email about your company, sent to everybody
Follow up and service	Answer fast, supply extra cuts of the data, offer a named person to quote	Going quiet for two days, by which time the story has moved on

One rule makes the whole thing easier: decide the headline a journalist would write before you start the research. If you cannot imagine the headline, the story is not there yet.

Judging a link in under a minute

Run these questions in order. The first three settle most cases.

• Would a relevant person click it? If the audience of that page has no reason to care, the link is decoration.
• Is it editorial? Somebody chose to link because the content was useful, rather than being paid or asked as part of a reciprocal arrangement.
• Is the linking page itself indexed and visited? Search for the page title. A page nobody reads and nothing links to is passing on very little.
• Does the site publish for anyone who pays? Check whether it carries unrelated posts in several industries with keyword rich anchors. That pattern is what Google's policies describe.
• Is the link in the body, in context? A link inside a sentence about your subject beats a link in a footer, a sidebar or an author bio.
• Does the anchor text read naturally? Exact match commercial anchors repeated across sites are a footprint.
• Is the topic adjacent to yours? Relevance does more work than any site level score.

What to leave alone

• Paid links that pass ranking credit, in any form: placements, sponsored posts without the sponsored attribute, paid inclusion in a roundup.
• Private blog networks and link exchanges, including the polite version where two companies agree to link to each other every month.
• Bulk directory submissions and bookmark sites, which Google names directly.
• Site wide footer links across multiple domains, including from sites you own.
• Forum and comment links placed for anchor text.
• Guest posting at volume on sites that exist to publish guest posts. One article in a publication your buyers read is worth more than fifty of these.
• Anything a supplier will not describe in detail. Google's advice on hiring help warns against firms that will not explain their methods, and it applies most of all here.

Measuring the work

• Referring domains that are new and relevant, counted monthly. The count on its own is less informative than the list, so read the list.
• Links to the pages you want to rank, not just to the home page.
• Coverage with a named source, since an unlinked mention of your data is often followed by a linked one.
• Referral traffic from the links, the cleanest evidence that a real audience was there.
• Rankings and impressions on the target pages, reviewed a month after the coverage rather than the week of it.

This page covers earning and judging links. For the pages that deserve the links once you have them, see keyword research in five steps. For the technical layer that makes a link count, work through a technical audit in order.

Asked and answered: link building

How many links do I need?

Work it out from the competition rather than from a target number. Take the five pages ranking for your phrase, look at how many relevant referring domains each has and where those came from, and build a list you could realistically earn. The shape of a link profile tells you more than the count.

Do nofollow links have value?

Yes, for real reasons: they bring visitors, they bring the attention of other writers, and coverage in one place tends to produce coverage in another. Judge any placement on the audience first.

Should I disavow bad links?

Leave the disavow file alone unless you have a manual action or you know your own agency built those links. Google discounts most low quality links on its own, and a careless disavow removes links that were helping.

Is guest posting still worth doing?

It is, when the publication has a real readership your buyers belong to, when the piece is genuinely written by you, and when the link makes sense in the text. Google's policies target the volume version of this, with low value content produced mainly for the link.

How long before links affect rankings?

Allow a few weeks for the linking page to be crawled and for the effect to settle, and review a month after a campaign rather than the day after. Judge a programme over two quarters, because individual links are noisy and the pattern is what matters.

The links that now do a second job

A good link passes trust to a page. It now has another use: the page that earned it often becomes a source an assistant cites. A citation in a trade article or a data study can show up again as the evidence behind a recommendation.

This gives you a new way to judge a link beyond the sixty second test. Ask an assistant a question your linked page answers and see whether the page, or the linking page, is cited. AI Knows Us lists the sources behind each answer, which shows which of your links are working twice.