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Link Building

Link building is the process of obtaining links from other websites to your own website.

What Does Link Building Mean?

Link building, or the process of building links, encompasses all efforts and measures aimed at acquiring high-quality backlinks from other websites. Since search engines may consider high-quality and relevant backlinks as a signal for the linked page, these can strengthen its authority and visibility.

Reputable link building aims to earn such links. Possible ways to achieve this include studies, tools, configurators, guides, or expert articles on reputable industry websites. Broadly speaking, it’s about creating content that others would be happy to link to.

Quality trumps quantity: A single link from a reputable source is worth more than a hundred insignificant ones.

Where did link building originate?

Link building emerged directly from Google’s ranking algorithm, which, in the late 1990s, made links between websites a key component of its ranking system. The arms race began immediately. More and more links appeared, most of them lacking any real quality.

Google stepped in and, starting in 2012, took stronger action against unnatural link patterns with updates like Penguin. Since this shake-up, the focus of reputable link building has shifted toward earning credible, useful, and relevant links.

Why is link building important?

In highly competitive niches, references and recommendations from others can play a decisive role in helping you stand out against established competitors. Link building helps build trust with both people and search engines. It gives your content more weight, helping it stand out.

At the same time, high-quality backlinks can drive organic traffic to your site and thereby increase your brand’s visibility within your professional community.

Benefits

  • High-quality link building establishes lasting authority.
  • Good links can strengthen individual pages and, through effective internal linking, also support the entire website.
  • They drive additional traffic to the website.
  • They make the brand more visible within its professional community.

Challenges

A good backlink must be earned. This requires content that’s worth linking to—and that takes effort.

Purchased or artificially generated links intended to manipulate rankings, on the other hand, violate guidelines and can have negative consequences.

Building a large, credible backlink profile requires patience and tact, because a uniform pattern of links can do more harm than good.

Example

A medium-sized manufacturer publishes a survey with reliable figures on a current industry topic. The data proves useful and is picked up by several trade magazines and an industry association, all of which link to the source.

The manufacturer did not actively seek out these links but earned them honestly through valuable content. These high-quality links can thus support the website’s authority and visibility.

Related terms

Backlink A backlink is a link on another website that leads to your own. Google can interpret such links as a signal of a page’s relevance and importance. Anchor Text Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. It tells you where the link leads. Domain Authority Domain Authority (DA) is a number between 1 and 100 that estimates how well a website might rank in search results. Black Hat SEO Black Hat SEO refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines' spam policies.