Guide
38 questions about backlinks and link building, answered straight. No padding, and no pretending the hard parts are easy.
Written by AxelonLast updated
The short answer
You get backlinks by giving a relevant site owner a reason to link to you: a genuinely useful page, an article worth publishing, a broken link you can fix, or a link back. Relevance beats volume every time, one link from a site covering your subject is worth more than a hundred from sites that do not, and anything that promises links at scale for money is buying you links that get ignored.
What a backlink is, what makes one worth having, and which of the numbers people quote at you actually mean anything.
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines have treated links as votes since the original PageRank work: if somebody links to your page, they are vouching for it in a small way. That is why links still matter. They are one of the few signals a site cannot award itself.
Yes. Google has never said it stopped using links, and they remain one of the strongest ranking signals available. What has changed is the weighting. Relevance and placement count for far more than raw volume, and low-quality links are now mostly ignored rather than counted, which is why buying thousands of them does nothing.
Four things: the linking site covers a related subject, the link sits inside the content rather than in a footer or sidebar, the page has real readers, and the site owner actually chose to add it. The short version is that a good backlink is one a reader would plausibly click.
A normal link passes ranking signals. A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", which historically told search engines not to pass any. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than an instruction, meaning it may count those links, and it has never said how often. In practice a nofollow link from a relevant site with real readers is still worth having.
Two more specific attributes Google introduced alongside the nofollow change. Sponsored marks a link that was paid for or part of an advertising arrangement. UGC marks a link in user-generated content, such as a comment or forum post. If money changed hands, sponsored is the honest marking and it is not an SEO judgement call.
Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link. It tells search engines what the destination page is about, so it should describe the page in natural language. The thing to avoid is the same exact-match commercial phrase repeated across dozens of links, because a natural link profile never looks like that and it is one of the easiest patterns to spot.
Domain Authority is a score out of 100 invented by Moz. Domain Rating is the Ahrefs equivalent. Neither is a Google metric and Google has repeatedly confirmed it does not use third-party scores. They are useful as a rough filter when you have a list of a thousand sites to sort, and meaningless as a target. Google retired its own public PageRank score back in 2016.
There is no number, because it depends entirely on what you are competing against. The practical method is to look at the pages currently ranking for your target term and see what they have. If the top results have a handful of links from small niche sites, that is your target. If they have hundreds from national press, pick a different term to start with.
No, but they matter for a different reason. Internal links spread authority around your own site and tell search engines what each page is about. They are also entirely within your control, which makes them the cheapest ranking improvement available. Most sites have pages with valuable links pointing at them that never pass any of it on.
For ranking, very little. A link repeated in the footer of every page on a site is one link as far as search engines are concerned, and a heavily discounted one, because nobody chose to place it on any particular page. They are still worth having for other reasons: a footer link on a busy site sends real referral traffic, and being visible on every page builds brand recognition in a way a single in-content link does not. Judge them as advertising rather than as link building.
Every common tactic, what it actually involves, and an honest read on whether it still works for a site without a budget.
Start with the links that do not require anyone to have heard of you: your own social and business profiles, any supplier or partner who lists customers, industry associations, and genuinely relevant niche directories. Then move to exchanges and guest posts with sites at a similar size to yours, because established sites will ignore you. AnyBacklink exists for that second stage: it is free, and it matches you with verified sites covering the same topics, so you are talking to owners who are also looking rather than cold emailing people who are not. The uncomfortable truth about a new site is that the first ten links are the hardest and there is no shortcut past them.
Link exchanges with relevant sites, guest posts written in exchange for the link rather than paid for, journalist request services, broken link building, resource page outreach, niche directories, and genuinely useful contributions to communities where your audience already is. None are free of effort. They are free of money, which is a different thing.
AnyBacklink solves this. Link exchanges are the one on that list you can start this afternoon. Tag your site with three topics and you will see every verified site that shares one.
A link exchange is two site owners agreeing to link to each other. It is the oldest link building tactic there is, it predates search engines caring, and it is how the early web was navigated. The modern version is usually a link inside an article on each side rather than a listing on a links page.
When the sites are genuinely relevant to each other, yes. A link from a site covering your subject, placed where a reader would click it, does not become worthless because the other owner also linked to you. What gets discounted is volume without relevance: mass exchanges, links pages, and schemes where hundreds of unrelated sites all point at each other.
AnyBacklink solves this. Relevance is the whole difference, so matching happens on shared topics and every site is verified before it is listed. Three keywords each, which caps the scale the guidelines warn about.
Google’s guidelines name "excessive link exchange" and "partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking" as link schemes. The operative words are excessive and exclusively. Two relevant sites linking to each other once, in content, is not what that describes, and the web would be unusable if it were. Where people get into trouble is scale: hundreds of exchanges, unrelated subjects, and pages built purely to hold links.
Instead of A linking to B and B linking back, A links to B, B links to C, and C links to A. People use it to avoid the reciprocal pattern being visible. In practice it adds complexity, makes the arrangement harder to keep honest, and the footprint is still detectable at any scale worth detecting. If the underlying links are relevant, the direct version was fine anyway.
Writing a genuinely good article for a site your audience reads, with a link where it belongs, still works and always has. What does not work is the industrial version: spun articles placed on sites that exist to sell placements, with a keyword-stuffed bio link. Google has run specific actions against large guest post networks. The test is whether the site would have published your article if there were no link in it.
If money changes hands for a link, it is a paid link regardless of what the invoice calls it, and Google’s position on paid links has not changed. Plenty of people do it and most get away with it, because the usual outcome is that the link gets ignored rather than the site penalised. Go in knowing that is what you are buying: a link that may be quietly worth nothing.
Creating something newsworthy, usually original data or a survey, and pitching it to journalists so they cover it and link to the source. When it works it produces exactly the links everyone wants: national publications, editorially chosen, entirely legitimate. It is also expensive, slow, and fails far more often than agency case studies suggest, which is why it suits budgets rather than side projects.
Services that email you reporter queries to answer can work, and a reply that genuinely fits the story does get picked up. The hit rate is low and falling, because every SEO in the world is now answering the same queries, often with the same AI-written paragraph. It rewards speed and actual expertise on the subject. If you have neither, spend the time elsewhere.
General web directories have been worthless for over a decade. Directories that are specific to your industry or your town are a different thing: a trade body listing, a local chamber of commerce, a supplier’s stockist page. If a real person would use the directory to find a business like yours, it is worth a listing. If it exists only to sell links, it is not.
You find a page linking to something that no longer exists, write or already have a replacement, and tell the site owner their link is broken and you have a fix. It works because you are doing them a favour first and the ask is small. It is slow, and the main cost is finding broken links on pages that are worth a link in the first place.
Finding pages that exist to list useful links on a subject, then asking to be included. It works when your page genuinely belongs on the list and fails when it does not, which is the whole skill. Search for your topic alongside phrases like "useful links" or "recommended resources" to find them.
Find a page with lots of links, write something better, then contact everyone linking to the original and suggest they link to yours instead. It was highly effective when few people were doing it. Now those site owners get several of these emails a week and ignore nearly all of them, because "mine is longer" is not a reason to edit a published page.
Buying links is against Google’s guidelines. The realistic risk is not usually a penalty, it is that the links are devalued and you paid for nothing. The other problem is that bought links stop working the moment you stop paying, so you are renting rankings rather than building anything. If you do it anyway, the sites that sell links to you sell them to everyone, including your competitors and plenty of spam.
Not directly. Links from the major social platforms are nofollow and are not a meaningful ranking signal on their own. What they do is put your page in front of people who might link to it, and drive the brand searches that do matter. Treat social as distribution that sometimes produces links, not as link building.
Dropping links in comments and forum signatures does nothing. Those links are almost always nofollow, the tactic has been dead for years, and the attempt marks you as a spammer in the one community you were trying to join. Actually participating in a forum where your audience is has real value, but the value is the relationships, not the link.
What can actually go wrong, what cannot, and how much of the fear around this is left over from 2012.
They can, but it is rarer than the industry suggests. Google’s systems are built to ignore links they do not trust rather than punish the site receiving them, precisely because anyone can point links at anyone. The exception is a pattern you built yourself at scale, which is treated as your doing and can result in a manual action.
Google’s own list covers buying or selling links, excessive exchanges, large-scale article marketing with keyword-heavy anchor text, automated link building, and links required as part of a contract. The thread running through all of it is scale and intent: arrangements that exist only to move ranking signals, in volumes no normal site produces.
Google Search Console tells you. There is a Manual Actions report, and if there is nothing in it, you do not have one. This matters because most traffic drops blamed on link penalties are not penalties at all. They are algorithm updates, seasonality, or losing a single high-traffic keyword.
Almost certainly not. Google has been consistent that the disavow tool is for sites with a manual action or a genuine history of buying links. For everyone else it does nothing at best, and at worst you disavow links that were helping you. If your Manual Actions report is empty, leave it alone.
Pointing spam links at a competitor is real in the sense that people attempt it, and largely ineffective in the sense that it usually does nothing. If unsolicited spam links reliably sank sites, nobody would rank for anything competitive. Check your Manual Actions report, and otherwise ignore it.
How to see what you have, and how long to wait before deciding something did not work.
Google Search Console has a Links report and it is free and authoritative for your own site. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz have larger crawls and better tooling, and they cost money. For checking your own backlinks, start with Search Console. For checking a competitor’s, you need one of the paid tools.
Google has to crawl the linking page first, which can take days or weeks depending on the site, and the effect then builds rather than switching on. A few weeks to a few months is realistic. If you are judging a link building campaign after three weeks, you are judging noise.
The idea that there is a safe monthly quota is largely a myth. Sites get a hundred links overnight when something goes viral and nothing bad happens, because those links look like what they are. What draws attention is not the speed but the pattern: a hundred links in a week from unrelated sites with identical anchor text, all pointing at a commercial page.
The three questions that come up once you stop reading about link building and start doing it.
Search your main topics and look at who ranks outside the big publishers, check who your competitors link out to, and look at the sites already linking to competitors. You are looking for sites at a similar size to yours covering the same subject, because those are the owners who will actually reply. Doing it by hand is a lot of searching for a short list.
AnyBacklink solves this. This is the entire job it does. Add your site, pick three topics, and the matching list is there, ranked by how much you overlap.
Who you are, which specific page of theirs you read, what you are proposing, and what they get. Three or four sentences. The reason template outreach fails is not that it is short, it is that it is obviously sent to hundreds of people, and a site owner who gets ten of those a day can spot one instantly. Naming something only a reader would know is the entire difference.
Take both, and stop agonising over it. If forced to choose, the relevant small site usually wins on ranking value, while the big site usually wins on traffic, credibility and the chance somebody else sees you and links. The mistake is turning down a good placement over an attribute, which people do constantly.
AnyBacklink matches you with verified site owners covering the same topics as you, so the outreach starts with somebody who already wants to hear from you. Free, and nothing is bought or sold.
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