A link from another website to yours is a vote. Google counts them, and it counts who is voting: one link from a site people trust is worth more than fifty from sites nobody has heard of.
That is the whole idea. The rest is what you do about it.
What actually works
- Write something worth linking to. Slow, and the only method that keeps paying. If a page answers a question properly, other people cite it because it saves them explaining it themselves.
- Guest posts. Write for a site in your field and link back from the author line. Real ones, on sites with real readers.
- Directories and listings. Not the link farms, the ones your customers actually use: your industry body, your local chamber, the platforms in your sector.
- Social. Not a ranking factor on its own, but it is how a page gets in front of the people who might link to it.
- Broken link building. Find a dead link on someone's page, tell them, offer your page as the replacement. It works because you are doing them a favour first.
What gets you punished
Buying links. Link farms. Networks that exist only to link to each other. Google has been detecting these for years and the penalty lands on your site, not on the one that sold you the link.
The tell is simple: if the only reason a link exists is SEO, it is the kind Google is looking for.
The uncomfortable part
Link building is slow. Anyone offering you a hundred links next month is selling the kind that gets you penalised. A handful of good ones a year will do more for you.
If you want to know where your links currently come from, we will look and tell you straight.
Builds websites and the systems behind them for small businesses in Spain and the Netherlands. Writes down the things clients ask twice.
