Let’s Be Honest About The Ranking Power Of Links via @sejournal, @martinibuster

What link building should be trying to accomplish, in my opinion, is proving that a site is trustworthy and making sure the machine understands what topic your web pages fit into. The way to communicate trustworthiness is to be careful about what sites you obtain links from and to be super careful about what sites your site links out to.

Context Of Links Matter

Maybe it doesn’t have to be said but I’ll say it: It’s important now more than ever that the page your link is on has relevant content on it and that the context for your link is an exact match for the page that’s being linked to.

Outgoing Links Can Signal A Site Is Poisoned

Also make sure that the outgoing links are to legitimate sites, not to sites that are low quality or in problematic neighborhoods. If those kinds of links are anywhere on the site it’s best to consider the entire site poisoned and ignore it.

The reason I say to consider the site poisoned is the link distance ranking algorithm concept where inbound links tell a story about how trustworthy a site is. Low quality outbound links are a signal that something’s wrong with the site. It’s possible that a site like that will have its ability to pass PageRank removed.

Reduced Link Graph

This is how the Reduced Link Graph works, where the spammy sites are kicked out of the link graph and only the legit sites are kept for ranking purposes and link propagation. The link graph can be thought of as a map of the internet with websites connected to each other by links. When you kick out the spammy sites that’s called the reduced link graph.

Search engines are at a point where they can rank websites based on the content alone. Links still matter but the content itself is now the highest level ranking factor. I suspect that in general the link signal isn’t very healthy right now. Less people are blogging across all topics. Some topics have a healthy blogging ecosystem but in general there aren’t professors blogging about technology in the classroom and there aren’t HR executives sharing workplace insights and so on like there used to be ten or fifteen years ago.

Links for Inclusion

I’m of the opinion that links increasingly are useful for determining if a site is legit, high quality, and trustworthy, deeming it worthy for consideration in the search results. In order to stay in the SERPs it’s important to think about the outbound links on your site and the sites you obtain links from. Think in terms of reduced link graphs, with spammy sites stuck on the outside within their own spammy cliques and the non-spam on the inside within the trusted Reduced Link Graph.

In my opinion, you must be in the trusted Reduced Link Graph in order to stay in play.

Is Link Building Over?

Link building is definitely not over. There’s still important. What needs to change is how links are acquired. The age of blasting out emails at scale are over. There aren’t enough legitimate websites to make that worthwhile. It’s better to be selective and targeted about which sites you get a (free) link from.

Something else that’s becoming increasingly important is citations, other sites talking about your site. An interesting thing right now is that sponsored articles, sometimes known as native advertising, will get cited in AI search engines, including Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. This is a great way to get a citation in a way that will not hurt your rankings as long as the sponsored article is clearly labeled as sponsored and the outbound links are nofollowed.

Takeaways

• Links As Trust And Context Signals, Not Drivers Of Ranking
  Links increasingly function to confirm that a site is legitimate and topically aligned, rather than to directly push rankings through volume or anchor text manipulation as in the old days.
• The Reduced Link Graph Matters
  Search engines filter out spammy or low-quality sites, leaving a smaller trusted network where links and associations still count. Being outside this trusted graph puts sites at risk of exclusion.
• Content Matters, Links Qualify
  Search engines can rank many pages based on content alone, but links can still act as a gatekeeper for credibility and inclusion, especially for competitive topics.
• Outbound Links Are A Risk Signal
  Linking out to low-quality or problematic sites can damage a site’s perceived trustworthiness and its ability to pass value.
• Traditional Link Building Is Obsolete
  Scaled outreach, anchor text strategies, and chasing volume are ineffective in an AI-driven search environment.
• Citations Are Rising In Importance
  Mentions and discussions of a website can cause a site to rank better in AI search engines
• Sponsored Articles
  Sponsored articles that are properly labeled as sponsored content and containing nofollowed links are increasingly surfaced in AI search features and contribute to visibility.

Link building is still relevant, but not in the way it used to be. Its function now is likely more about establishing whether a site is legitimate and clearly associated with a real topic area, not to push rankings through volume, anchors, or scale. Focusing on clean outbound links, selective relationships with trusted sites, and credible citations keeps a site inside the trusted reduced link graph, which is the condition that allows strong content to compete and appear in both traditional search results and AI-driven search surfaces.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/AYO Production

The Facts About Trust Change Everything About Link Building via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Trust is commonly understood to be a standalone quality that is passed between sites regardless of link neighborhood or topical vertical. What I’m going to demonstrate is that “trust” is not a thing that trickles down from a trusted site to another site. The implication for link building is that many may have been focusing on the wrong thing.

Six years ago I was the first person to write about link distance ranking algorithms that are a way to create a map of the Internet that begins with a group of sites that are judged to be trustworthy. These sites are called the seed set. The seed set links to other sites, which in turn link to ever increasing groups of other sites. The sites closer to the original seed set tend to be trustworthy websites. The sites that are furthest away from the seed set tend to be not trustworthy.

Google still counts links as part of the ranking process so it’s likely that there continues to be a seed set that is considered trustworthy from which the further away you a site is linked from the seeds the likelier it is considered to be spam.

Circling back to the idea of trust as a ranking related factor, trust is not a thing that is passed from one site to another. Trust, in this context, is not even a part of the conversation. Sites are said to be trustworthy by the link distance between the site in question and the original seed set. So you see, there is no trust that is conveyed from one site or another.

The word Trustworthiness is even a part of the E-E-A-T standard of what constitutes a quality website. So trust should never be considered as a thing that is passed from one site to another because it does not exist.

The takeaway is that link building decisions based on the idea of trust propagated through links are built on an outdated premise. What matters is whether a site sits close to trusted seed sites within the same topical neighborhood, not whether it receives a link from a widely recognized or authoritative domain. This insight transforms link evaluation into a relevance problem rather than a reputation problem. This insight should encourage site owners to focus on earning links that reinforce topical alignment instead of chasing links that appear impressive but have little, if any, ranking value.

Why Third Party Authority Metrics Are Inaccurate

The second thing about the link distance ranking algorithms that I think is quite cool and elegant is that websites naturally coalesce around each other according to their topics. Some topics are highly linked and some, like various business association verticals, are not well linked at all. The consequence is that those poorly linked sites that are nevertheless close to the original seed set do not acquire much “link equity” because their link neighborhoods are so small.

What that means is that a low-linked vertical can be a part of the original seed set and display low third-party authority metrics scores. The implication is that the third-party link metrics that measure how many inbound links a site has fail. They fail because third-party authority metrics follow the old and outdated PageRank scoring method that counts the amount of inbound links a site has. PageRank was created around 1998 and is so old that the patent on it has expired.

The seed set paradigm does not measure inbound links. It measures the distance from sites that are judged to be trustworthy. That has nothing to do with how many links those seed set sites have and everything to do with them being trustworthy, which is a subjective judgment.

That’s why I say that third-party link authority metrics are outdated. They don’t follow the seed set paradigm, they follow the old and outdated PageRank paradigm.
The insight to take away from this is that many highly trustworthy sites are being overlooked for link building purposes because link builders are judging the quality of a site by outdated metrics that incorrectly devalue sites in verticals that aren’t well linked but are actually very close to the trustworthy seed set.

The Important Of Link Neighborhoods

Let’s circle back to the observation that websites tend to naturally link to other sites that are on the same topic. What’s interesting about this is that the seed sets can be chosen according to topic verticals. Some verticals have a lot of inbound links and some verticals are in their own little corner of the Internet and aren’t link to from outside of their clique.

A link distance ranking algorithm can thus be used to calculate the relevance according to whatever neighbhorhood a site is located in. Majestic does something like that with their Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow metrics that actually start with trusted seed sites. Topical Trust Flow breaks that score down into specific topic categories. The Topical Trust Flow metric shows how relevant a website is for a given metric.

My point isn’t that you should use that metric, although I think it’s the best one available today. The point is that there is no context for thinking about trustworthiness as something that spreads from link to link.

Once you can think of links in the paradigm of distance within a topic category it becomes easier to understand why a link from a university website or some other so-called “high trust” site isn’t necessarily that good or useful. I know for certain because there was a time before distance ranking where the topic of the site didn’t matter but now it does matter very much and it has mattered for a long time now.

The takeaways here are:

1. It is counterproductive to go after so-called “high trust” links from verticals that are well outside of the topic of the website you’re trying to get a link to.
2. This means that it’s more important to get links from sites that are in the right topic or from a context that exactly matches the topic, from a website that’s in an adjacent topical category.

For example, a site like The Washington Post is not a part of the Credit Repair niche. Any “trust” that may be calculated from a New York Times link to a Credit Repair site will likely be dampened to zero. Of course it will. Remember, seed set trust distance is calculated within groups within a niche. There is no trust passed from one link to another link. It is only the distance that is counted.

Logically, it makes sense to assume that there will be no validating effect between irrelevant sites. relevant website for the purposes of the seed set trust calculations.

Takeaways

• Trust is not something that’s passed by links
  Link distance ranking algorithms do not deal with “trust.” They only measure how close a site is to a trusted seed set within a topic.
• Link distance matters more than link volume
  Ranking systems based on link distance assess proximity to trusted seed sites, not how many inbound links a site has.
• Topic-based link neighborhoods shape relevance
  Websites naturally cluster by topic, and link value is likely evaluated within those topical clusters rather than across the entire web. A non-relevant link can still have some small value but irrelevant links stopped working almost twenty years ago.
• Third-party authority metrics are misaligned with modern link ranking systems
  Some third-party metrics rely on outdated Page Rank-style link counting and fail to account for seed set distance and topical context.
• Low-link verticals are undervalued by SEOs
  Entire niches that are lightly linked can still sit close to trusted seed sets, yet appear weak in third-party metrics, causing them to be overlooked in link builders.
• Relevance outweighs perceived link strength
  Links from well-known but topically irrelevant sites likely contribute little or nothing compared to links from closely related or adjacent topic sites.

Modern link evaluation is about topical proximity, not “trust” or raw link counts. Search systems measure how close a site is to trusted seed sites within its own topic neighborhood, which means relevant links from smaller, niche sites can matter more than links from famous but unrelated domains.

This knowledge should enable smarter link building by focusing efforts on contextually relevant websites that may actually strengthen relevance and rankings, instead of chasing outdated link authority scores that no longer reflect how search works.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Kues

Improve Any Link Building Strategy With One Small Change via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Link building outreach is not just blasting out emails. There’s also a conversation that happens when someone emails you back with a skeptical question. The following are tactics to use for overcoming skeptical responses.

In my opinion it’s always a positive sign when someone responds to an email, even if they’re skeptical. I consider nearly all email responses to be indicators that a link is waiting to happen. This is why a good strategy that anticipates common questions will help you convert skeptical responses into links.

Many responses tend to be questions. What they are asking, between the lines, is for you to help them overcome their suspicions. Anytime you receive a skeptical response, try to view it as them asking you, “Help me understand that you are legitimate and represent a legitimate website that we should be linking to.”

The question is asked between the lines. The answer should similarly be addressed between the lines. Ninety nine percent of the time, a between-the-lines question should not be answered directly. The perfect way to answer those questions, the perfect way to address an underlying concern, is to answer it in the same way you received it, between the lines.

Common  and weird questions that I used to get were like:

• Who are you?
• Who do you work for?
• How did get my email address?

Before I discuss how I address those questions, I want to mention something important that I do not do. I do not try to actively convert the respondent in the first response. In my response to their response to my outreach, I never ask them to link to the site.

The question of linking is already hanging in the air and is the object of their email to you- there is no need to bring that up. If in your response you ask them again to link to your site it will tilt them back to being suspicious of you, raising the odds of losing the link.

In trout fishing, the successful angler crouches so that the trout does not see you. The successful angler may even wear clothing that helps them blend into the background. The best anglers imitate the crane, a fish-eating bird that stands perfectly still, imperceptibly inching closer to its prey. This is done to avoid being noticed. Your response should imitate the crane or the camouflaged angler. You should put yourself into the mindset of anything but a marketer asking for a link.

Your response must not be to immediately ask for a link because that in my opinion will just lose the link. So don’t do it just yet.

Tribal Affinity

One approach that I used to use successful is what I called the Tribal Affinity approach. For a construction/home/real estate related campaign, I used to approach it with the mindset of a homeowner. I wouldn’t say that I’m a homeowner (even though I was), I would just think in terms of what would I say as a homeowner contacting a company to suggest a real estate or home repair type a link. In the broken link or suggest a link strategy, I would say that the three links I am suggesting for their links page have been useful to me.

Be A Mirror

A tribal affinity response that was useful to me is to mirror the person I’m outreaching to, to assume the mindset of the person I am responding to. So for example, if they are a toy collector then your mindset can also be a toy collector. If the outreach target is a club member then your outreach mindset can be an enthusiast of whatever the club is about. I never claim membership in any particular organization, club or association. I limit my affinity to mirroring the same shared mindset as the person I’m outreaching to.

Assume The Mindset

Another approach is to assume the mindset of someone who happened upon the links page with a broken link or missing a good quality link. When you get into the mindset the text of your email will be more natural.

Thus, when someone responds by challenging me by asking how I found their site or who am I working for my response is to just stick to my mindset of a homeowner and respond accordingly.

And really, what’s going on is that they’re not really asking how you found their site. What they’re really asking, between the lines, is if you’re a marketer of some kind. You can go ahead and say yes, you are. Or you can respond between the lines and say that you’re just a homeowner. Up to you.

There are many variations to this approach. The important points are:

• Responses that challenge you are not necessarily hostile but are often link conversions waiting to happen.
• Never respond to a response by asking for a link.
• Put yourself into the right mindset. Thinking like a marketer will usually lead to a conversion dampening response.
• Put yourself into the mindset that mirrors the person you outreach to.

Get into the mindset that gives you a plausible reason for finding their site and the best words for asking for a link will write themselves.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

Lazy Link Building Building Strategies That Work via @sejournal, @martinibuster

I like coming up with novel approaches to link building. One way to brainstorm an approach is to reverse a common method. I created a couple of approaches to link building, several are passive and two others are a little more active but have very little to do with email outreach. I wrote about these tips back around 2013, but I’ve polished them up and updated them for today.

Passive Link Building

Someone asked that I put together some tips for those who are too lazy to do link building. So here it goes!

Guilt Trip Copyright Infringers

Check who’s stealing your content. Be  hard on scrapers. But if it’s an otherwise legit site, you might want to hold off asking them to take down your content. Check if they’re linking to a competitor or similar sites, like from a links page.

You can ask them nicely to take down the content and after they email you back to confirm the link is down, email them back to thank them. But then say something like, “I see you are linking to Site-X.com. If my content was good enough to show on your site, then I would be grateful and much obliged if you considered it good enough to list from your links page.”

I heard a keynote speaker at an SEO conference once encouraging people to come down hard on people who steal your content. I strongly disagree with that approach. Some people who steal your content sometimes are under the impression that if it’s on the Internet then it’s free and they can use it on their own site.  Some think it’s free to use as long as they link back to your site.

If they are linking to your site, tell them that you prefer they don’t infringe on your copyright but that you would be happy to write them a different article they can use as long as they link back to your site. You can be nice to people and still get a link.

Reverse Guest Posting

Instead of publishing articles on someone else’s site, solicit people to publish on your site. Many people tweet, promote, and link from their sites to sites that they are interviewed on. An interesting thing about doing this is that interviewing people who have a certain amount of celebrity helps to bring more people to your site, especially if people are searching for that person.

Relationship Building

Authors of books are great for this kind of outreach. People are interested in what authors and experts say. Sometimes you can find the most popular authors and influencers at industry conferences. I’ve met some really famous and influential people at conferences and got their email address and scored interviews by just going up and talking to these people.

This is called relationship building. SEOs and digital marketers are so overly focused on sending out emails and doing everything online that they forget that people actually get together in person at industry events, meetups, and other kinds of social events.

Giveaways

This is an oldie and I get it that many SEOs have talked about this. But this is something that I used successfully from way back around 2005. I did an annual giveway to my readers and website members.

The way I did it was to contact some manufacturers of products that are popular with my readers and ask for a discount if I buy in bulk and tell them I’ll be promoting their products to my subscribers, readers, and members. I’ve been responsible for making several companies popular by bringing attention to their products, elevating them from a regional business to a nationwide business.

Leverage Niche Audience For Links

The way to do this is to identify an underserved subtopic of your niche, then create a useful section that addresses a need for that niche. The idea is to create a compelling reason to link to the site.

Here is an example of how to do this for a travel destination site.

Research gluten free, dairy free, nut-free, raw food dining destinations. Then make a point to visit, interview, and build a resource for those.

Conduct interviews with lodging and restaurant owners that offer gluten free options. You’ll be surprised by how many restaurants and lodgings might decide on their own to link to your site or maybe just hint at it.

Summary

Outreach to sites about a niche topic, not just to businesses but also to organizations and associations related to that niche that have links and resources pages. Just tell them about the site, quickly explain what it offers and ask for a link. This method is flexible and can be adapted to a wide range of niche topics. And if they have an email or publish articles, suggest contributing to those but don’t ask for a link, just ask for a mention.

Don’t underestimate the power of building positive awareness of your site. Focus on creating positive feelings for your site (goodwill) and generating positive word of mouth, otherwise known as external signals of quality. The rankings will generally follow.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

The Quid Pro No Method Of Link Building via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Expressly paying for links has been out for awhile. Quid Pro No is in. These are some things you can do when a website asks for money in exchange for a link. During the course of building links, whether it’s free links, publishing an article or getting a brand mention, it’s not unusual to get solicited for money. It’s tempting to take the bait and get a project done. But I’m going to suggest some considerations prior to making a decision as well as a way to turn it around using an approach that I call Quid Pro No.

Link building, digital pr, brand mention building can often lead to solicitations for a paid link. There are many good reasons for not engaging in paid links and in my experience it’s possible to get a link without doing it their way when someone asks you for money in return for a link.

Red Light Means Stop

The first consideration is that someone who has their hand out for money is a red light is because it’s highly likely they have done this before and are highly likely linking to low quality websites that are in really bad neighborhoods, putting the publisher’s site and any sites associated with it into the outlier part of the web graph where sites are identified as spam and tend to not get indexed. In this case consider it a favor that they outed their site for the crap neighborhood it resides in and walk away. Quid pro… no.

Getting solicited for money can be a frequent occurrence. Site publishers, some of them apparently legit, are publishing Guest Post Submission Guidelines for the purpose of attracting paying submissions. It’s an industry and overly normalized in certain circles. Beware.

Spook The Fish

A less frequent occurrence is by the newb who’s trying to extract something. If the site checks out then there may be room for some kind of concession. If they’re asking for money, in this case, Quid Pro No means to FUD them away from this kind of activity THEN turn them around to doing the project on your terms.

When angling on a river fish that’s on the hook might make a run downstream away from you which makes it tough to land the fish because you’re fighting the fish and the current. Sometimes a tap on the rod will spook them into changing position. Sometimes a sharp pull can direct them to turn around. For this character I have found it efficacious to spook them with all the bad things that can happen and turn them around to where I want them to be.

Very briefly, and in the most polite terms, explain you’d love to do business, but that there are other considerations. Here’s what you can trot out:

• FTC Guidelines
  FTC guidelines prohibit a web publisher from accepting money for an unlabeled advertisement.
• Google Guidelines
  Google prohibits paid links

Land The Link

What’s in it for me is a useful concept that can be used to convince someone that it’s in their interest to do things your way. It’s important to convince the other party that there’s something in it for them. They want something so sometimes it’s worthwhile to make them feel as if they’re getting something out of the deal.

The approach I take for closing a project, whether it’s a free link or an article project is to circle back to asking for an article project by focusing on communicating why my site is high quality and ways that we can cross-promote. It’s essentially relationship building. The message is that your site is authoritative, well promoted and that there are ways that both sites can benefit without doing a straight link buy.

But at this point I want to emphasize again that any site that’s asking for money in exchange for a link is not necessarily a good neighborhood. So you might not actually want a link from them if they’re linking out to low quality sites.

Or Go For A Labeled Sponsored Post

However, another way to turn this around is to just go ahead and pay them as long as it’s a labeled as a sponsored post and contains either multiple no-follow links and or brand mentions. Sponsored posts get indexed by search engines and AI platforms that will use those as validation for how great your site is and recommend it.

What’s beautiful about a labeled sponsored post is that they give you full control over the messaging, which can be more valuable than a tossed-off link in a random paragraph. And because everything is disclosed and compliant, you reduce the long-term risk while still capturing visibility in AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity through the citation signals.

Quid Pro No

Quid Pro No is about negatively responding to a solicitation and turning it around and getting something you want without actually saying the word no.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Studio Romantic