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A backlink is the only part of SEO you cannot publish yourself. Titles, copy, speed: those are yours to fix. Whether a trade journal, an industry body or a partner points to you is someone else's decision. That is exactly why Google gives links weight, and exactly why a whole industry wants to sell you some.
Why Google still treats a link as a vote
Google started in 1998 with an idea borrowed from academia: a paper that is cited a lot is probably important. Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied it to the web as PageRank. Every link is a vote, and a vote from a page that itself gets many votes counts for more. It worked so well that a trade in links appeared almost at once. Google answered with the Penguin update in 2012 and, today, with spam policies that name buying, selling and large-scale swapping of links outright.
Links are now one signal among many, next to content, technical health and what searchers do. But they remain the hardest signal to fake, and they are much of what Google means by authority, the A in E-E-A-T. Tools rank sites on scores such as domain authority; those numbers come from software vendors, not from Google.
Six kinds of source, six different weights
- Regional pressa lot
- Trade federationa lot
- Suppliermedium
- Client, in the footermedium
- Business directorylittle
- Bought linknothing
Our estimate from experience; Google publishes no weights. Line thickness is the weight.
Links when you enter a new country
A company that ranks well at home often starts from nothing abroad, because its links come from home-market sites. Google wants to see that people in the new market vouch for you too. These are the sources worth chasing, roughly in order of weight:
| Source | Why it counts | How to earn it |
|---|---|---|
| Trade and regional press | Independent, local, on topic | News worth printing: a launch, a local hire, your own figures |
| Industry bodies and chambers of commerce | Recognised members of the sector | Join, and fill in the member profile in full |
| Local partners and distributors | A business relationship in the market | Ask to be listed on their partner or supplier page |
| Clients in that market | First-hand proof you deliver there | Good work, then a request for a case mention |
| Events, universities, sponsorships | Strong local signal | Speak, sponsor, offer an internship |
| Business directories | Weak, but useful for local search | The same name, address and phone number everywhere |
The strongest links are earned by a page worth linking to: a calculator, a benchmark with your own data, a guide that answers a question completely. How to plan those is covered under content marketing. Directory listings matter mostly if you want to be found in a specific town, which is the territory of local SEO and your Google Business Profile.
The credit at the bottom of a client site
At the foot of the sites we built for Villa Lidia and Business Centrum there is a line saying who made the site, linking to ours. Those are genuine, earned links: a client saying who built their website. They carry less weight than a link in an article, because they repeat on every page and say nothing about a topic. The same holds for you: a distributor that describes what you did together on its references page gives more than a logo in a row of logos.
What a good link costs you
Not money, but time. A list of twenty sites in your market and sector that would naturally link to you: half a day. Complete profiles with the relevant industry bodies and directories: an afternoon. A page worth linking to, such as a calculator or an overview with your own figures, takes days to weeks, and keeps earning links as long as it stays correct. To see which pages already receive links and whether they arrive without errors, run the SEO checker; how link work fits into an overall budget is in what SEO costs.
The guest post offer in your inbox
The weekly offer of a "guest post with a do-follow link" for a fixed fee is what Google calls link spam whenever the link is meant to pass value and is not marked as sponsored. At best Google ignores it and you paid for nothing; at worst your rankings drop. And sites that sell links sell them to everyone, casinos included.
Link questions from marketing managers
Do I need the disavow tool?
Almost never. Google says it is meant for sites with a manual action or a large number of spammy links they cannot remove. Random low-quality links pointing at you are mostly ignored already.
Does a nofollow link count?
Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints rather than rules. Such a link passes less, but still brings visitors and makes your name known. Paid links should carry the sponsored label.
How many backlinks do we need?
There is no number. A focused company with a dozen relevant links from its market and sector often outranks a site with thousands of links from places that have nothing to do with it.