What Is Link Building, and What Actually Works Now
Link building is the practice of earning references from other websites. Links remain one of the strongest ranking signals, which is why there is such a large market in selling them — and why so much of that market delivers nothing.
Why bought links stopped working
Marketplace links come from sites built to sell links. They have no genuine audience, publish across unrelated topics, and their outbound link patterns are trivially identifiable. Google increasingly discounts them to zero.
The practical risk is not usually a penalty. It is simpler: you pay, and nothing happens. Then when the pattern is eventually recognised, you have cleanup work as well.
What earns links now
Original data. The highest-yield asset available. Journalists need numbers, and a business with operational data has numbers nobody else can publish. Aggregate, anonymised patterns from your own operations are genuinely newsworthy to trade press.
Expert commentary. Journalists need quotes on deadline. Being responsive and genuinely knowledgeable produces a steady stream of coverage.
Useful tools. A calculator or checker that solves a real problem earns links continuously without further outreach.
Genuine guest contributions to publications with actual readerships — which is a different activity from paying for placement on a content farm.
Unlinked mention reclamation. Businesses are mentioned without links more often than they realise. Asking is the cheapest link acquisition there is.
UK-specific sources
Trade publications in your sector, professional bodies and trade associations, chambers of commerce, universities and research institutions, regional press, and legitimate review platforms. Regional press in particular is under-used — reachable, genuinely editorial, and largely ignored by national outreach campaigns.
Anchor text
A natural link profile is dominated by brand and URL anchors, because that is how people actually link to things. Sites that get into difficulty show the opposite signature: a high proportion of exact-match commercial anchors, because every link was placed by someone optimising for a keyword.
| Anchor type | Target share | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | ~50% | Rezz Digital |
| Naked URL | ~20% | rezzdigital.com |
| Generic | ~15% | this guide, read more |
| Partial match | ~10% | this SEO pricing guide |
| Exact match | ~5% | SEO services UK |
Velocity
Steady acquisition beats campaign spikes. Three to eight quality referring domains a month, sustained, outperforms sixty in one quarter followed by nothing — and looks considerably more natural.
Quality over count
Total backlink count is close to meaningless. What matters is the number of distinct referring domains, their topical relevance to your sector, whether they have a genuine audience, and whether the link is editorial rather than placed.
Third-party authority metrics — DA, DR and similar — are useful for triage but are not Google metrics. A relevant link from a modest trade publication in your sector beats a high-metric link from an unrelated general-interest site.
Disavow
Over-used. Google ignores most low-quality links without help, and reflexive disavowing removes links that were passing value. Genuine cases: a manual action, or a documented history of paid link building. Otherwise, audit and leave alone.
How long it takes
Individual links can influence rankings within weeks of being crawled. Domain-level authority takes six to twelve months to shift measurably. Link building is the slowest-paying SEO discipline and the one most often abandoned just before it starts working.