What is link building? How links help rankings and the main ways to get them

At a glance

• Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours, so that search engines rank your pages higher.
• Google says link analysis, including PageRank, is still part of its core ranking systems.
• A backlink is the result and link building is the work that produces it.
• A link is worth more when it comes from a relevant page with its own authority and traffic, sits inside the content, and uses natural anchor text.
• Google’s spam policies cover links built to manipulate rankings whatever the tactic, so “white hat” outreach and bought links fall under the same policy.

What link building is

Search engines treat links from other sites as a signal that a page is worth showing. The more relevant and trusted the sites linking to a page, the stronger that signal. That is why link building has been part of SEO for as long as search engines have counted links.

Why links matter to rankings

When Google launched, one of its core ranking systems was PageRank: a way of scoring pages by the links pointing to them, where a link from a page that itself has many links counts for more. Think of each link as a vote, weighted by how many votes the voter has.

Google still says so. Its ranking systems guide states: “We have various systems that understand how pages link to each other” and calls PageRank “one of our core ranking systems used when Google first launched”, adding that “How PageRank works has evolved a lot since then, and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems” (Google Search Central, fetched 2026-10-28).

Links are one signal among many. Content, relevance to the query and the page experience all count. But our PBN guide makes the practical point: when everyone in a niche publishes similar, well-optimized content, “in the end, links are what’s ranking you on the first page.”

Link building vs backlinks

People use the two terms almost interchangeably, but they mean different things. A backlink is a link from another site to yours: the result. Link building is the work that produces backlinks: the process. You can have backlinks without doing any link building, because people link to useful pages without being asked. Link building is what you do when that isn’t happening fast enough.

What makes one link worth more than another

Not all links count the same. These are the factors that decide how much a link is worth:

• Relevance. A link from a site about your topic counts for more than one from an unrelated site. Our PBN guide puts it simply: “topically relevant links are worth more than generic ones.”
• The linking page’s own strength. A page that has its own backlinks and gets real search traffic passes more value than a page nobody links to or visits.
• Placement. A link inside the body of an article, in a sentence that makes sense, is worth more than one in a footer, sidebar or a long list of links.
• Anchor text. The clickable words tell search engines what the target page is about. Natural, varied anchors look like real links. The same exact-match keyword on every link looks built.
• Followed or nofollow. Links marked rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" tell Google not to pass ranking credit. Most link building aims for followed links.

SEO tools put a number on some of this: Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, Moz’s Domain Authority and Majestic’s Trust Flow. Those are each vendor’s own metric, not Google’s, and they are estimates. They are useful for comparing sites, but a high score on a site with no traffic doesn’t make the link valuable.

The main ways to build links

There are six broad approaches. Most link builders combine two or three.

Approach	Control over the link	Cost	Speed	Scale	Risk
Earned links from content	Low	Your time and content budget	Slow	Limited by how linkable your content is	Low
Outreach and guest posts	Some	Time, often fees	Moderate	Moderate	Moderate when fees are involved
Digital PR	Low	Moderate to high	Slow, then sudden	Unpredictable	Low
Broken link building	Low	Time	Slow	Limited	Low
Buying links	Low	Per link or retainer	Fast	High	High on sites that sell to everyone
Your own network	Full	Domains, hosting, content	Weeks to set up	As large as you build it	Depends on how well it’s built

Earned links from content

You publish something people want to reference, such as original data, a free tool or a clear guide, and other sites link to it on their own. This is the cleanest kind of link and the hardest to produce on demand.

Outreach and guest posts

You find sites in your niche and ask for a link, or offer an article with a link inside. It works, but it is slow, and many site owners now ask for a fee before they say yes.

Digital PR

You create a story journalists will cover and pitch it to them. A successful campaign can earn links from major publications. Many earn few or none, and you can’t tell in advance which.

Broken link building

You find links on other sites that point to dead pages, then offer your page as the replacement. Our tools roundup covers how to find them.

Buying links

You pay a seller or a site owner to place a link. It is fast, and the sites that sell to anyone are the easiest for search engines to find. See what link building services sell before you pay for one.

Building your own network

You buy expired domains that still have backlinks, build blogs on them and link to your own sites. Our PBN guide’s case for it is control: “The ultimate goal is to have control over link-building efforts for your money sites.” You pick the anchor, the page and the timing. The drawback, in the guide’s words, is “the high upfront investment in time and money.” The free PBN guide walks through it, and Easy Blog Networks hosts and maintains the blogs. See what a PBN is for the basics.

Which of these to pick for your site is a separate question, covered in our guide to link building strategies. For the software side, see our roundup of link building tools.

What Google says, and what we think

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.” The examples include “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes”, “Excessive link exchanges”, “Using automated programs or services to create links to your site”, and links “with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites” (developers.google.com, fetched 2026-10-28).

Read that list again and notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t sort tactics into safe and unsafe. Any link built mainly to move rankings is covered, whether it came from a paid placement, a guest post or an outreach email. Most beginner guides split link building into “white hat” (outreach, guest posts) and “black hat” (everything else), and imply the first group is safe. By Google’s own wording, it isn’t.

Our view, from the PBN guide, is that the white hat and black hat labels are misused. Black hat means hacking or exploiting other people’s websites. A private blog network is “all your property.” PBNs are against Google’s guidelines, which makes them grey hat, “but so are any other types of link-building efforts, like buying links, and even popular ‘white hat’ options like outreach and guest posts.” The guide is also blunt about whose interests the guidelines serve: “If you’re a small business, Google is not your friend.”

So the useful question isn’t “is this tactic white hat?” It is: how much control do I have, how detectable is it, and what does it cost? The table above is built around those questions. For tactics that really do cross the line into exploiting other sites, see black hat link building.

What to avoid in link building

• Public link networks and link farms: sites that sell links to anyone, with outbound links to every niche.
• Bought PBN links. The guide’s rule is “Always build your own blog network, and don’t sell links on it.” A network that sells links is public, and public networks get found.
• Automated link blasts: software that creates thousands of profile, comment and forum links. Google names it as link spam, and the links are worthless anyway.
• Exact-match anchors on every link. A natural link profile uses brand names, plain URLs and varied phrases.
• Links from sites with high metrics and no traffic. The score is the product being sold.

Is link building still relevant?

Yes. Google still says links are part of its core ranking systems, as quoted above. And in competitive niches, where every top page is well written and well optimized, links are often what separates them. What has changed is which links count. Google said in 2021 that its link spam update was “even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam”, so a few relevant links on real sites are worth more than many links from sites that exist to sell them.

How much does link building cost?

It ranges from free (your time on content and outreach) to a large monthly budget for paid placements or a network of your own. Our breakdown of link building cost covers each model. If you would rather not pay at all, see how to build backlinks without paying.

How to start

1. Check the links you already have. Google Search Console’s Links report shows a sample of the sites linking to you, and a tool like Ahrefs shows more.
2. Look at the top three or four competitors for your main keyword. Note how many sites link to them and what kind of sites they are.
3. Pick one or two approaches from the table that fit your time, budget and appetite for control.
4. Track rankings for the pages you build links to, and give each round of links several weeks before you judge it.