Most digital PR campaigns earn zero citations. The problem usually isn’t the outreach, it’s the story.
Journalists are buried in pitches. The ones that earn coverage lead with data the journalist actually wants to write about, sent to the right person at the right outlet. Everything else gets ignored.
Why Digital PR Keeps Underperforming
Digital PR is one of the most reliable ways to earn high-authority links and brand mentions, the kind that lift both organic rankings and visibility in AI Overviews. But most campaigns underperform because the pitch doesn’t give journalists a reason to respond. Teams burn weeks on outreach that never lands a single placement.
Kevin Rowe, CEO at PureLinq, leads an enterprise digital PR practice that turns original research into media coverage at scale. His team’s campaigns have earned 1,000+ citations while many sites are losing organic traffic.
Learn the system behind the case studies, including the formats, targeting, and relationship tactics you can apply yourself.
Google’s recently announced “preferred sources” feature is not exactly new. The feature, which allows searchers to designate websites as sources in AI Overviews and AI Mode, has been in the “Top stories” section of search results, which appears for time-sensitive or newsworthy topics.
While “Top stories” is more for news publications, being a preferred source inside AI Overviews and AI Mode would help any website.
Preferred Sources FAQs
How does Google’s “preferred sources” work?
Searchers who assign a site as a preferred source see a label next to its name in AI Mode and AI Overviews.
“Preferred” labels appear next to preferred sources in AI Mode and AI Overviews. Image: Google.
Many questions remain. For example:
Will preferred sources show for topics vaguely related to the query?
Say I query “FIFA World Cup.” Would AI Overviews show an article on, for example, England’s Premier League from one of my preferred sources?
Will Google elevate visibility in search results for popular “preferred sources” websites?
The answer is likely yes, since Google has historically relied on user-generated input in its ranking signals.
Regardless, “preferred sources” is an opportunity to entice readers or customers to a site more often.
How do I invite visitors to assign my site as a preferred source?
The process is easy but not entirely intuitive.
The first step is to create your unique site URL. Google allows only domains and subdomains, not subdirectories such as example.com/folder. Add your domain here instead of “example.com”:
Users who log in to Google and click the URL will see a prompt to add your site as a preferred source. You can add the link to your newsletter and website.
The unintuitive part is the need to check the box next to a domain to add it.
It’s a good idea to explain the process while sharing the link. For example, “Add our site as a preferred source in Google. Click the link and then check the box next to our domain.”
(Add Practical Ecommerce as a preferred source here.)
Check the box on the right to add a preferred source.
Why is this important?
Through its many updates and announcements, Google has made clear its evolution to personalized search results. Its post announcing preferred sources stated as much:
When you come to Search, you’re looking for information you can trust from the sources, websites, and creators you value most.
In short, being a preferred source means increased visibility in AI answers, more returning visitors, and likely greater trust within Google’s ecosystem.
Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about how Google treats outbound links from a site that has a link-related penalty. His answer suggests the situation may not work in the way many assume.
An SEO asked on Bluesky whether a site that has what they described as a “link penalty” could affect the value of outbound links. The question is somewhat vague because a link penalty can mean different things.
Was the site buying or building low quality inbound links?
Was the site selling links?
Was the site involved in some kind of link building scheme?
Despite the vagueness of the question, there’s a legitimate concern underlying it, which is about whether getting links from a site that lost rankings could also transfer harmful signals to other sites.
“Hey @johnmu.com hypothetically speaking. If a site has a link penalty are the outbound links from that site devalued? Or do they have the ability to pass on poor signals.. ie bad neighbours?”
There are a number of link related algorithms that I have written about in the past. And as often happens in SEO, other SEOs will pick up on what I wrote and paraphrase it without mentioning my article. Then someone else will paraphrase that and after a couple generations of that there are some weird ideas circulating around.
Poor Signals AKA Link Cooties
If you really want to dig deep into link-related algorithms, I wrote a long and comprehensive article titled What Is Google’s Penguin Algorithm. Many of the research papers discussed in that article were never written about by anyone until I wrote about them. I strongly encourage you to read that article, but only if you’re ready to commit to a really deep dive into the topic.
Another one is about an algorithm that starts with a seed set of trusted sites, and then the further a site is from that seed set, the likelier that site is spam. That’s about link distance ranking, ranking links. Nobody had ever written about this link distance ranking patent until I wrote about it first. Over the years, other SEOs have written about it after reading my article, and though they don’t link to my article, they’re mostly paraphrasing what I wrote. You know how I can tell those SEOs copied my article? They use the phrase “link distance ranking,” a phrase that I invented. Yup! That phrase does not exist in the patent. I invented it, lol.
The other foundational article that I wrote is about Google’s Link Graph and how it plays into ranking web pages. Everything I write is easy to understand and is based on research papers and patents that I link to so that you can go and read them yourself.
The idea behind the research papers and patents is that there are ways to use the link relationships between sites to identify what a site is about, but also whether it’s in a spammy neighborhood, which means low-quality content and/or manipulated links.
The articles about Link Graphs and link distance ranking algorithms are the ones that are related to the question that was asked about outbound links passing on a negative signal. The thing about it is that those algorithms aren’t about passing a negative signal. They’re based on the intuition that good sites link to other good sites, and spammy sites tend to link to other spammy sites. There’s no outbound link cooties being passed from site to site.
So what probably happened is that one SEO copied my article, then added something to it, and fifty others did the same thing, and then the big takeaway ends up being about outbound link cooties. And that’s how we got to this point where someone’s asking Mueller if sites pass “poor signals” (link cooties) to the sites they link to.
Google May Ignore Links From Problematic Sites
Google’s John Mueller was seemingly confused about the question, but he did confirm that Google basically just ignores low quality links. In other words, there are no “link cooties” being passed from one site to another one.
Mueller responded:
“I’m not sure what you mean with ‘has a link penalty’, but in general, if our systems recognize that a site links out in a way that’s not very helpful or aligned with our policies, we may end up ignoring all links out from that site. For some sites, it’s just not worth looking for the value in links.”
Mueller’s answer suggests that Google does not necessarily treat links from problematic sites as harmful but may instead choose to ignore them entirely. This means that rather than passing value or negative signals, those links may simply be excluded from consideration.
That doesn’t mean that links aren’t used to identify spammy sites. It just means that spamminess isn’t something that is passed from one site to another.
Ignoring Links Is Not The Same As Passing Negative Signals
The distinction about ignoring links is important because it separates two different ideas that are easily conflated.
One is that a link can lose value or be discounted.
The other is that a link can actively pass negative signals.
Mueller’s explanation aligns with the idea that Google simply ignores low-quality links altogether. In that case, the links are not contributing positively, but they are also not spreading a negative signal to other sites. They’re just ignored.
And that kind of aligns with the idea of something else that I was the first to write about, the Reduced Link Graph. A link graph is basically a map of the web created from all the link relationships from one page to another page. If you drop all the links that are ignored from that link graph, all the spammy sites drop out. That’s the reduced link graph.
Mueller cited two interesting factors for ignoring links: helpfulness and the state of not being aligned with their policies. That helpfulness part is interesting, also kind of vague, but it kind of makes sense.
Takeaways:
Links from problematic low quality sites may be ignored
Links don’t pass on “poor signals”
Negative signal propagation is highly likely not a thing
Google’s systems appear to prioritize usefulness and policy alignment when evaluating links
If you write an article based on one of mine, link back to it. 🙂
How Links, Mentions, and Authority Influence Rankings and AI Discovery
Authority and presence across the web continue to play a central role in search visibility, even as AI-driven experiences reshape how SERPs appear.
Links, brand mentions, and trust signals continue to influence how Google evaluates credibility, both in traditional rankings and in AI-powered SERPs. The challenge for SEO teams is determining which off-page efforts to prioritize in 2026.
It’s easy to waste effort on shortcuts that do little to build long-term authority, so in this session, Michael Johnson, Founder and CEO of GrowResolve.com, will share a practical framework for developing modern off-page SEO strategies that improve organic rankings and support AI visibility. The focus of this SEO webinar is on sustainable approaches that help brands earn trust, not chase tactics that no longer deliver value.
What You’ll Learn
Which off-page signals drive results in 2026, including links, mentions, topical authority, and trust.
How to build a diversified off-page strategy without relying on a single tactic or vendor.
Scalable link building approaches for in-house teams, including Digital PR, partnerships, and brand-led content.
Why Attend?
This webinar provides clear guidance on where to focus off-page SEO efforts as search continues to evolve. You will leave with a practical, decision-making framework to build authority, improve visibility, and avoid wasted effort in 2026.
Register now to learn how to build off-page SEO strategies that support long-term authority and visibility.
🛑 Can’t attend live? Register anyway, and we’ll send you the on-demand recording after the webinar.
The following are five things that anyone can do to establish authoritativeness and trustworthiness that can be communicated quickly and contribute to earning more links. The trick to this technique is that you have to put some time into these tactics first but the rewards after you are done are links, lots of them.
The idea behind this tactic is to convince a web publisher to give you a free link, or to give you the opportunity to publish an article (with or without a customary byline and link).
In order to cut through the noise of all the other emails the web publisher receives, it is necessary to establish your authority in order to inspire trust. And you need to do it quickly. These are some touchstones I crafted, through trial and error, in order to accomplish a higher success level in link building campaigns.
I call this method, Establishing your Bona Fides. It works by creating trust with one to two sentences. Whether at the beginning, middle or end of the outreach is up to you, but I’ve enjoyed a good response rate by placing it near the beginning.
Here are the shortcuts to establishing bona fides:
Awards
Media appearances and mentions
List of authoritative organizations that have published your work
List of peers that have published your work
Authority of your website’s authors
As you can see this isn’t really something you can fake your way through. But if you take the time to first establish your bona fides (what makes your legitimate and authoritative), you will see a higher percentage of positive response rates. People will take your emails more seriously.
There is no need to be annoying and badger people over and over the way some marketing agencies do. The success rate improvement from this method will cut the need for such aggressive pestering, something that I have never approved of.
The first two bona fides are self explanatory. But I will explain them quickly.
Awards It’s always useful to obtain recognition in whatever field that you are in (if that’s a thing). Even if it’s recognition for volunteering for an organization and doing charitable work. Other kinds of awards are the kind that local news might give out, like best whatever in whatever town your company is based out of.
Media Appearances And Mentions Appearing in television news, being cited in respected news or online magazines are ways to establish signals of authoritativeness. Signals of authoritativeness aren’t just ranking signals, they are also the kinds of things that humans respond to.
Organizations And Associations The third bona fide relates to associations and organizations that your company is allied or partnered with, and any publications that are related to those organizations, both online and offline. Some organizations are always on the lookout for people to profile or publish articles by for their association publications. This kind of publishing is a great way to establish authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It’s truly earning recognition for your expertise.
Publishing articles in offline publications are a bonanza. While you likely won’t get a link, you will also be the rare online organization submitting a guest post in those publications. Most companies and marketing agencies aren’t doing this because there is no link associated with it. This this will be your advantage because as you’ll see, it will help to increase your link building success rate. When you publish an article in an authoritative space, even if it’s offline, it gives you the ability to rightfully say in your outreach email that you’ve been published in so and so magazine or newsletter. Associating your brand with the authoritative brand in this way instantly makes your brand authoritative to the person you’re communicating with. This is especially powerful if the person you’re communicating with is also a member of whatever association or organization that you have published an article with.
The reason this approach works is that it enables you to establish yourself as authoritative with a single sentence. With only a few words in your outreach email, you can quickly profile your site as not a spammer, and a legit organization that’s ultimately worthy of getting a link. In my experience this has worked exceedingly well for consistently earning instant trust from whoever you’re outreaching to.
You can get to number four (list of peers that have published your work) without doing number three (list of organizations that have published your work). But you’ll have greater success if you put a good amount of number three projects behind you. Even if you don’t use all the projects in your initial outreach email, you may have to deploy them in follow up emails to doubting recipients who need more convincing. And you get add all of these to your About Us page.
Authority Of Website Authors Point number five (authority of your website’s authors) is more or less self-explanatory. It helps if the person authoring your articles is someone who the outreach recipient can identify with, can think of as “one of us” when you list their credentials. For example, I once did an outreach in the educational space citing the writing talents of a math teacher who was also an education technology blogger. This person’s credentials and authority opened doors for my link building outreach and helped my client receive links from some truly prestigious education related websites.
Obviously, the success of this approach requires do some work ahead of time to get appearances in blogs, podcasts, video interviews, publishing in association and organization online and offline publications. Even taking a photo with someone who is well known and authoritative and putting that on your About Us page can be helpful. People who are considering giving you a link will go to your website’s About Us page to verify who this company is and if they’re as above board and authoritative as you say.
Using the above pre-campaign tactics will improve your trustworthiness and authoritativeness and have a positive impact on link building success rates.
This post was sponsored by uSERP. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Let’s get real. Most link building agencies are selling you an outdated playbook from 2015.
Volume. Guest posting on dead sites. Chasing domain ratings at all costs.
But if you’re a marketing leader in 2026, you know the game has changed.
I’ve spent the last decade completing over 575 link building campaigns and scaling my team at uSERP to 55+ people. I have worked with SaaS giants like monday.com and Robinhood.
I know first hand that the gap between a bad backlinks agency and a great one is no longer just about rankings. It is about revenue.
Here’s what I have learned, and how you can use it to pick a skilled link building agency in the AI era.
Why You Must Know These Tips: The Link Building Landscape Has Shifted
Traditional link-building isn’t dead. But the old methods are broken.
For years, SEO agencies focused only on domain authority (DA) or domain rating (DR).
They built backlinks from any site with a high number of backlinks. They ignored readership and content quality.
But that approach is dangerous now.
Because search engines have evolved, links now serve two masters: Google’s algorithm and AI model training data.
Ignoring this means losing search engine rankings (and watching your bottom line suffer).
In fact, uSERP’s 2025 State of Backlinks Report, which surveyed 800 SEO professionals, found that 67.5% believe backlinks influence overall search results (a rise from 2023).
But it’s not just quantity. Quality and brand authority work together, month after month, to drive traffic.
This data forced us to pivot at uSERP. We stopped chasing vanity metrics like DR.
Instead, we started prioritizing traffic and relevance.
It turns out that a single link from a site that appears in a Perplexity answer is worth more than 10 links from high-DR sites with zero readership.
Agencies that fail to adapt are dying, and so are their clients.
So the bottom-line question is:
How can you pick a link building agency that catapults your business in this AI era instead of leaving you stranded?
Green Flags: What Separates Elite Agencies
It’s easy to promise the world on a sales call. It’s harder to deliver natural links that drive revenue.
When vetting partners, look for these specific green flags.
They Focus On AI Visibility, Not Just Rankings
Elite agencies don’t just track Google SERPs.
They track brand mentions in LLMs. They understand that a link is a citation. It validates your expertise to both humans and machines.
Ask them this: “Can you show me examples of clients appearing in AI-generated answers?”
If they stare blankly, walk away.
If they have a proven system, that’s a green flag. It means they know what they’re doing.
You cannot just beg for links anymore. You have to earn them with a content-driven approach.
That is why digital PR was the most effective link-building tactic in 2025, according to our State of Backlinks Report.
The winning strategy is simple. Produce linkable assets, such as original studies, interactive tools, and expert commentary.
These assets generate inbound links naturally. They get cited by AI and compound over time.
For example, a SaaS brand might create a salary calculator. Journalists and publishers love this data.
This approach also shifts the dynamic from cold outreach to relationship-based link building. Even if you do cold outreach, you should expect better results because it’s a win-win for both parties, and you’re leading with quality content and data they can’t ignore.
They Are Transparent About Process And Pricing
A skilled backlinks agency has nothing to hide.
Vague promises are red flags. Detailed reporting on publishers, anchor text, and traffic estimates is a green flag.
They are also realistic about costs.
For example, our data show that most SEO professionals spend between $5,000 and $10,000 per month on link building.
If someone offers you 100 links for $500, that’s a liability, not a deal.
They should also provide a dashboard that includes your link inventory, KPIs, and how your content is driving traffic over time.
Transparency builds trust. Secrecy usually hides black hat link building tactics.
Let’s look at red flags you should stay far away from.
This is the price of buying temporary tactics. It’s the equivalent of shiny object syndrome that wastes time, money, and reputation for the sake of slightly higher initial traffic that evaporates after a couple of months.
Here are the warning signs.
Promises Of Specific Ranking Positions
“We will get you to #1 in 30 days.”
This is a lie.
No agency controls Google. They can influence probabilities, but they cannot guarantee outcomes.
Ranking factors are very complex. Plus, some are unknown, and agencies can only estimate probabilities based on experience and data.
Anyone guaranteeing a spot is selling snake oil.
The Use Of PBNs And Link Farms
PBNs (Private Blog Networks) are poison for your site.
They’re fake “blogs” that exist for one reason: to pass authority. They violate Google’s rules and go against its spam policies.
If your agency is buying links off some “menu” or dropping niche edits on hacked, junk sites, that’s your cue to walk away.
Sure, these backlinks might temporarily boost your domain rating. But sooner or later, your search visibility winds up circling the drain.
Templated Outreach
If they use the same email template for everyone, they are failing.
Journalists receive dozens of these every day and just ignore or delete them. Website owners mark them as spam.
You need a personalized approach.
Sending thousands of generic emails daily reflects poorly on your brand.
Links That Disappear
This is a silent killer. Ahrefs found that 66.5% of links from 2013 to 2024 are now dead.
Cheap agencies take your money and move on.
You need a partner who monitors their work. They must check for link rot and take steps to fix it to protect your investment and your brand’s organic growth.
The Questions You Must Ask Before Signing
Don’t just trust a Clutch profile. Grill potential partners with these questions.
1. “What Is Your Process For Vetting Publishers?”
They should talk about how they verify traffic and how they check for spammy sites. If they’re not even looking at a site’s keyword rankings, that’s a big red flag.
2. “Can I See Examples Of Client Results In AI Overviews?”
This separates modern agencies from the dinosaurs.
Ask how they measure AI visibility by impact in ChatGPT or Perplexity.
3. “What Is Your Typical Timeline?”
If they say “immediate results,” they are lying.
You could have a severe technical issue that, once fixed, could cause a permanent spike in traffic. But that’s a rare exception.
Real SEO services take time. BuzzStream’s 2025 State of Digital PR Report states that most campaigns deliver results within 3-6 months.
4. “How Do You Measure Success Beyond DR Increases?”
Domain rating is a vanity metric if it doesn’t lead to revenue. They should track growth in organic search traffic and referral traffic.
Ask about backlink gap analysis and see if they share a high-level step-by-step of their link building process.
5. “What Is Your Replacement Policy If Links Go Down?”
Given the high rate of link rot, a replacement policy is essential. You need backlink management that protects your investment.
Decide if you want digital PR or traditional link building with AI enhancements. But make sure there’s accountability and a process that actively monitors and replaces rotten links.
The competitors were winning in organic search, taking over primary keywords, and gaining market share.
So, we focused on untapped keywords first. We created helpful content and optimized it to land crucial backlinks from publications like Crunchbase and G2.
We focused on quality plus relevance. Then, monday earned volume with the cause-and-effect principle.
The result was a 77.84% increase in traffic to 1.2M+ monthly visitors.
This is the lens you need: relationship-building techniques that demonstrate real authority and value, resulting in ROI. Not just rankings.
Whether in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Canada, quality link building like this takes 60-90 days for early signals and 6-12 months for full impact. But the dividends last for years.
Link Arms With A Link Building Expert
Picking a link building agency in 2026 isn’t about finding the cheapest option. It is about finding partners who understand the AI-first future.
You need transparency, AI visibility results, and digital PR expertise.
Avoid anyone selling the 2015 playbook. The winners focus on citations, AI brand mentions, and revenue growth. Everything else is just noise.
Start asking the hard questions. Look for the green flags and don’t settle for vanity metrics.
For more foundational strategies, check out our complete link building guide.
Is your page not attracting the number of people you thought it would? Or are you wondering what you can improve to get your page higher up in the search results? And to get people to stay on (and come back to) your site? There are a few things you can do to give your page a better chance at performing well. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how you can determine which pages could use some extra love and what you can do to turn them into high-quality pages!
It is important to realize that content quality can have a big impact on your business and online findability. Especially since Google announced its helpful content update, your rankings might suffer if you have too much low-quality content. It’s not just about using the right keyword; search engines nowadays look at the whole picture. So it’s important to identify those low-quality pages and work your magic.
How to determine page quality
It’s important to determine which pages need improving and in what order. It can be tempting to just get started with the first page that comes to mind, but take some time to work out how your pages perform. This helps you prioritize and decide on what page needs your attention first.
Have a look at the metrics
You probably know your audience to some degree, but it’s unlikely that you know exactly what they want. Or how they search online and navigate through your site. Even if you have a hunch or hear from them regularly, make sure to look at the data to validate what people do on your site and where you can improve. A great tool to do this is Google Analytics. It can tell you how many people visit your site and where they’re coming from. Additionally, which pages are being visited the most, and how long people tend to stay on each page. All of this helps you determine the quality of your individual pages. So it’s well worth the effort to start learning about Google Analytics.
Use the Yoast SEO content analysis
Yoast SEO cleverly analyses your content to help you identify problems. Your content might have readability issues, making it hard for users to understand what you’re saying. Or you might have overused your keywords, making your text seem unnatural and spammy. Using Yoast SEO, you can easily see which pages and posts need improvement by looking at the traffic lights in the overview.
Yoast SEO shows red and orange traffic lights in the overview to highlight content issues
Identify low-quality pages with Screaming Frog
A tool you can use to easily identify low-quality content is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. When you run a query for your website in the SEO spider, you will get a list of all the URLs on your site. Now scroll through that list and visit every URL that makes no sense to you. The fact is, low-quality pages often occur in groups, rather than as a single page.
Think along the lines of old .html pages, where you end your URLs with a trailing slash now. Think about your attachment pages or anything with too many numbers in it. These should all make you feel suspicious. Visit the page and see if it displays low-quality content that shouldn’t be on Google. Test if these pages are indexed and check if there are more pages like them. Take a critical look at the pages you’ve found.
10 tips to directly improve page quality
Once you’ve assessed the quality of your individual pages, it’s a good idea to create a list prioritizing the pages you want to work on first. After that, the real fun begins. Let’s take a look at the first 10 tips to improve your page quality.
1. Decide on what you want to do with the page
First things first, figure out what you want to do with your page. For pages that are no longer up to date, ask yourself the following question: Can you update the page by making changes to it? Great, then you can go to the second tip on this list. But for pages that no longer have any business being on your site anymore, it might be best to remove them. Decide whether you want to update or delete the page.
Chances are that you’ll also resurface a few outdated pages that don’t need to be shown in Google, even if you want to keep them on your site. On these pages you can use the noindex tag. If a low-quality page still holds relevant links to other parts of your website and has some traffic due to, for instance, links from other websites, you can use noindex, follow in your robots meta tag. This way, Google can find the page, follow the relevant links, but it will keep the page itself out of the search results.
You can find these indexing options in the Advanced tab in the Yoast SEO meta box
2. Think about search intent
When you want to improve the quality of a page, it’s good practice to take search intent into consideration. Search intent (or user intent) is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. To be more exact, it’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. Over the years, Google has worked hard to improve its algorithm to be able to determine people’s search intent. That’s why you need to think about matching your content to someone’s search intent when they land on your page.
The reason we’re discussing this here is that you want to make sure your pages show up for the right search intent. When someone is looking for information, you don’t want to send them to your product page right away. They’re probably not ready for that yet. And when someone does have a transactional intent, you don’t want them to land on one of your blog posts discussing the latest news. In that case, you want to ensure they go to the right product (or category) page right away.
An important factor that determines the quality of your page is content. There are a few basics that you need to tackle right away. For one, always base your content on the right keyphrases by conducting keyword research. Also, if your low-quality page doesn’t have a lot of text and doesn’t hold a lot of information, this could be considered thin content. Your users and search engines aren’t fans of this type of content, as it has little or no value to them. So make sure to write extensively on the topic you want to be found on.
Try to be critical of your writing and become the source for people instead of copying another source. Although it’s always good to keep an eye on your competition and the content they’re producing, make sure to have your own voice. If you write unique, insightful, useful content, people will be much more inclined to actually read it or link to it. Google will see that content as an addition to its index.
4. Show E-E-A-T
Everyone can own a website nowadays. Which is great, as this opens up the web for everyone. But this online growth has also resulted in trust issues when it comes to sites you’re not familiar with yet. That’s why it’s crucial to show readers, and search engines, that you can be trusted and that you’re an authority in your field. This doesn’t just help your pages show up in the search results; it also helps users reach the level of trust they need to do business with you online.
Google is working hard to recognize and reward high-quality content, and this is where E-E-A-T also comes into play. This acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This core concept is outlined in their Search Quality Raters guidelines and is used to evaluate online content. Meaning that your content will be judged as higher quality if you show experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. All of these will enhance the quality of your pages while helping you build a strong brand online.
5. Work on your site reputation
Another factor that is closely related to trustworthiness is the reputation of your website. This is something search engines also take into account when determining the quality of the pages on your site. But how do they determine your reputation? By analyzing what others are saying about you online. For example, user ratings about your site and how positive these are. But also other experts or established sites mentioning your business on their site. Or any other information about your business or authors mentioned on other sites.
6. Link to and from your page
For people and search engines to be able to find your page, you need to ensure that you link to it. From other pages on your website that are related to the one you’re currently working on. So make sure to work on your internal linking and connect the content on your website to each other.
That being said, it’s important not to overdo it and link to every page you own in one post. Always keep the user in mind. So make sure to link to pages or posts that are actually relevant and that you can link to naturally. Our plugin has a great internal linking tool that suggests related content for every post or page.
Tips to improve site performance
We still have 4 tips to go, and they’re all related to the performance of your site. Some of them may take some more time, but these aspects are essential if you want to improve the quality of your pages. Not just for the search engines, but especially for your users.
7. Improve your site’s speed
The speed of your website determines whether you get a good ranking in Google, and its importance keeps growing. Why? Because faster sites are easier for search engines to process. And because search engines know that users don’t like slow websites. Users tend to buy less from slower sites and don’t read and engage as much as they would on a site with great site speed. So work on improving your site speed, you’ll be thankful for it later. Google also made page experience a ranking factor, making speed and user experience on your site even more important.
8. Consider user experience
User experience, also called UX, is all about how users experience a site or product. Search engines want to provide their users with the best results for their search queries. The best result doesn’t only mean the best answer, but also the best experience. So even if you’ve written an excellent answer in a post, but your site is slow or a mess, Google won’t consider your post the best answer.
Consider the goal of your site and its specific pages. What do you want visitors to do on your page? Buy stuff? Read your articles? Your design and content should support this goal. Having a clear goal in mind will also help you prioritize the improvements for your site. This ties in with the search intent of a certain page, but you should also consider whether the design and structure of your pages support the goal of your site. And how does your site work on mobile devices?
9. Don’t forget about accessibility
The last question mentions your mobile site, and with good reason. Mobile is such a big part of most people’s lives nowadays that you don’t have the luxury of not having a well-performing mobile site. Make sure your site works on different devices and in different browsers to cater to every one of your site visitors. We have an ultimate guide on Mobile SEO that helps you determine the state of your mobile website and what you can still improve on.
10. Keep your site healthy and safe
The safety and health of your site is important for the visibility of your site, but it’s also important for you and your business. So make sure to check how safe your site is right now and make the necessary improvements to keep your site happy and healthy. If you’re using WordPress, we have blog posts that help you with your site’s health and your security in a few easy steps.
Time to improve that page quality!
All of these tips will help you improve the quality of your pages. And give Google a website that truly helps their visitors, and in the end, simply answers their question. As soon as you have cleaned up all that low-quality content and all high-quality pages surface in Google, you know you’ve made yet another sustainable step towards better rankings. Have fun!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
