Online visibility is built on three pillars: how your website is structured (technical SEO), what’s on it (content), and what others say about you elsewhere on the internet (authority). Now we’ll focus on the third one.
Credibility is difficult to measure. The founders of Google borrowed a solution for this from the academic world. In science, the importance of a study has long been measured by how many people cite it and who they are. Google began doing the same thing with websites, except here the citation is a link.
The more authoritative websites that link to you, the more authoritative you are.
This principle remains one of the foundations of how search engines work to this day.
An industry built on references
If links are worth that much, it's no surprise that an entire industry has sprung up around acquiring them. This is called link building: companies pay to have articles published on other sites that link back to their own website.
This is a bit of a gray area. According to Google’s guidelines, buying links counts as manipulation, yet in practice, it’s widely used. It’s completely accepted in Central and Eastern Europe, but our American or German partners consider it cheating and are generally afraid to use it. After all, it’s understandable: have you ever seen a German cross the crosswalk when the light is red?
Even so, link building remains one of the core activities of search engine marketing. As I wrote in my first email, the rise of AI search engines doesn’t make it obsolete, because even they rely largely on Google’s search results. If you’re not ranked well there, you won’t appear in AI responses in the long run either.
However, there are two things that are worth keeping in mind.
One reason is that it only makes sense to spend money on link building if your site has no technical issues or content gaps.
If the site is slow or has thin content, no matter how many links point to it, there’s a good chance we’ve thrown a good chunk of our money out the window.
The other thing is that buying links alone won't work miracles. You have to measure its impact, properly evaluate the results, and incorporate the lessons learned into the next round. Without that, you can only hope it works.
A Quick Guide to Link Building
If you're going to start building links, here are five things you should check.
- Know in advance where the articles will be published. Ask them which pages they plan to feature your content on. Good agencies aren't afraid to show you their plans.
- Check out these pages. The more original content a site has, the more reliable it is. Avoid link farms—that is, sites that conspicuously contain nothing but a series of purchased, link-filled articles. Also make sure the content is relevant to your topic: an article about home insurance on the “Gödöllő Baroque Year Has Seen Better Days” website, sandwiched between articles about artificial nails and mattresses, isn’t helpful to anyone, except for the agency that forced this on its client as a link-building service. (Unfortunately, this is a real example!)
- Choose your keywords carefully. Links also signal to Google why your site should be considered authoritative, so you can use them to build authority around certain keywords. Don’t do this haphazardly; instead, follow a well-thought-out strategy (which keywords attract genuinely interested visitors, and where do you have a chance to make progress?).
- Check to make sure the articles have actually been published. First, check to see if they’re live; second, check to see if the article that links to you has been indexed by Google, because without that, the link’s SEO value is only a fraction of what it should be. The question is simple: did you get what you paid for?
- Measure the impact. After a few months, check to see if your ranking has improved for the keywords you focused on. If not, that's also useful information: it means you should revisit one of your previous steps.
It matters how you spend it
If the basics are in order, a significant portion of your search marketing budget will go toward link building. That’s why it’s important to invest in it thoughtfully. Otherwise, you’ll be throwing money out the window without even seeing where it lands.
