Successful link and brand mention building is strongly about overcoming skepticism and building relationships with the people behind the websites that you want to acquire a link or brand mention from. It can be as simple as showing what you have in common or inspiring a sense of goodwill towards your site.
Overcoming Skepticism: Try Non-Link Brand Building
One of the biggest barriers to acquiring a link, particularly a free link, is skepticism. For example, I recall that one of my campaigns repeatedly received rejections from non-profit type organizations and associations because the client site was commercial in nature, even though this particular client site lacked the overt signals of commercial intent like ads or products, associations and organizations were resistant.
This is how I discovered there are other opportunities for building top of mind brand awareness with brand mentions. Although these organizations were skeptical about linking to commercial client sites they were way okay with accepting contributions to their email newsletters and magazines that were sent out every month to thousands of potential customers.
Lessons To Learn From The Broken Link Outreach
The broken link outreach is an old approach that works (Hi, I saw you have a broken link on your page/And btw would you consider adding example.com?). One thing that doesn’t get discussed is why it works.
The reason why broken link building works is instructional on crafting an outreach with a high conversion rate. Ever see a supermarket shopper drop a few boxes and subsequently be assisted by a stranger? Most people typically welcome help. Most people generally smile. Why is that? How do you feel when someone helps you?
I feel good and believe most others do, too. Not only that, there is a temporary bond between us in the form of a good feeling. That’s called goodwill. Goodwill is a general feeling of kindness and friendliness to someone else. When someone does something kind to someone else, the other person thinks, “Oh, this is a nice person.” That’s goodwill.
I believe that is the reason why the broken link outreach works so well. The normal skeptical distance is temporarily bridged by an amount of goodwill that is earned by helping someone else out. The approach bridges the skeptical distance between strangers.
Knowing this, don’t limit yourself to broken links. The approach should be renamed from Broken Links Outreach to simply the Goodwill Outreach because it works for anything that is broken on a site and leads to building goodwill.
For example:
Typos
Broken code
Spam comments
Hacked web pages
A dangerously out of date CMS installation
During the course of your free link campaign, keep your approach flexible by keeping an eye out for hidden opportunities for bridging the distance of skepticism. This means having the flexibility to alter your approach to fit the typo, broken code, out of date CMS installation, etc. This is the challenge facing those who are scaling up or outsourcing to a third party, they simply cannot pivot to acting on an unexpected opportunity.
For example, you might review a site and discover that they have a resources page or you might discover that they have a monthly newsletter that goes out to ten thousand potential customers. Being flexible to brand building or alternative helpful approaches helps to create a better sense of authenticity and build goodwill that can turn into a link or a valuable brand mention.
Social Affinity
Social Affinity is a subtle signal that works. Like it or not, people still tend to think in tribal terms. They feel better about you if they know you share the same values and interests. Sharing work, geographic, and social similarities work to bridge the distance between you and the site publisher handing out links.
Doing this can be as simple as having a badge on your site that shows you donate to a specific charity or that you’re a member of an organization. A powerful way to signal social affinity is to mention that you’ve published an article in a sister-chapter of an organization or association.
This can be an aspect of the outreach persona. The word persona literally means a mask, it has etymological roots in the Latin word persōna, which meant a mask that was used in a theatrical production. I’ll discuss outreach persona at another time. For the time being, it’s just how you represent yourself in your outreach through subtle cues.
For example, many years ago I was working on a client’s free link campaign and noticed that success rate went up when there was a geographical/regional affinity between the outreach persona and the link acquisition target. What this means is that the success rate went up when the outreach came from a domain where a state or city name in the outreach domain was geographically close to the organization or association that I was outreaching to.
This is similarly true with my personal link campaigns, where my persona shares a topical affinity, especially when there is a shared hobby or vocation. It’s an “Oh, they’re a part of my tribe” type of reaction. They can be trusted. These are social signals that can be useful for overcoming inherent skepticism.
Social signals when applied in the right context can help overcome skepticism and build that bridge by presenting evidence in your outreach or website of your social membership. For example, if your outreach is related to the outdoors, then being a member, sponsor, or contributor to wildlife conservation groups can help bridge the skeptical distance with the publishers you are contacting for a link.
Link Building Is About Goodwill And Social Affinity
A great deal of link building is built on the premise of scale where people send out tens of thousands of emails (spray) and then “pray” that a small percentage of respondents will convert and provide a link. In my experience, being careful, planning ahead for social affinity and being aware of opportunities to be helpful can open doors of opportunities for both brand mention and link building.
Building brand awareness has long been an important but widely overlooked part of SEO. AI Search has brought this activity to the forefront. The following ideas should assist in forming a strategy for achieving brand name mentions at a ubiquitous scale, with the goal of achieving similar ubiquity in AI search results.
Tell People About The Site
SEOs and businesses can become overly concerned with getting links and forget that the more important thing to do is to get the word out about a website. A website must have unique qualities that will positively impress people and make them enthusiastic about the brand. If the site you’re trying to build traffic to lacks those unique qualities then building links or brand awareness can become a futile activity.
User behavior signals have been a part of Google’s algorithms since the 2004 Navboost signals were kicking in and the recent Google antitrust lawsuit shows that user behavior signals have continued to play a role. What has changed is that SEOs have noticed that AI search results tend to recommend sites that are recommended by other sites, brand mentions.
The key to all of this has been to tell other sites about your site and make it clear to potential consumers or website visitors what makes your site special.
So the first task is always to make a site special in every possible way.
The second task is to tell others about the site in order to build word of mouth and top-of-mind brand presence.
Optimizing a website for users and cultivating awareness of that site are the building blocks of the external signals of authoritativeness, expertise, and popularity that Google is always talks about.
Downside of Backlink Searches
Everyone knows how to do a backlink search with third-party tools but a lot of the data consists of garbage-y sites; that’s not the tool’s fault, it’s just the state of the Internet. In any case, a backlink search is limited, it doesn’t surface the conversations real people are having about a website.
In my experience, a better way to do it is to identify all instances of where a site is linked from another site or discussed by another site.
Brand And Link Mentions
Some websites have bookmark and resource pages. These are low hanging fruit.
The “-site:example.com” removes the competitor site from the search results, showing you just the sites that might mention the full URL of the site which may or may not be linked.
The goal is not necessarily to get links. It’s to build awareness of the site and build popularity.
Brand Mentions By Company Name
One way to identify brand mentions is to search by company name using the TLD segmentation technique. Making a broad search for a company’s name will only get you some of the brand mentions. Segmenting the search by TLD will reveal a wider range of sites.
Segmented Brand Mention Search
The following assumes that the competitor’s site is on the .com domain and you’re limiting the search to .com websites.
Competitor's Brand Name site:.com -site:example.com
Segmented Variants:
Competitor's Brand Name site:.org
Competitor's Brand Name site:.edu
Competitor's Brand Name site:.Reddit.com
Competitor's Brand Name site:.io
etc.
Sponsored Articles
Sponsored articles are indexed by search engines and ranked in AI search surfaces like AI Mode and ChatGPT. These can present opportunities to purchase a sponsored post that enables you to present your message with links that are nofollow and a prominent “sponsored post” disclaimer at the top of the web page – all in compliance with Google and FTC guidelines.
Brand Mentions: Authoritativeness Is Key
The thing that some SEOs never learned is that authoritativeness is important and quite likely millions of dollars have been wasted on paying for links from low-quality blogs and higher quality sites.
ChatGPT and AI Mode are found to recommend sites that are mentioned in high quality authoritative sites. Do not waste time or money paying for mentions on low quality sites.
Some Ways To Search
Product/Service/Solution Search
Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.com “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.net “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.org “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.edu “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.io “sponsored article” etc.
Sponsored Post Variant
Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.com “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.net “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.org “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.edu “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.io “sponsored post” etc.
Key insight: Test whether “sponsored post” or “sponsored article” provides better results or just more results. Using quotation marks, or if necessary the verbatim search tool, will stop Google from stemming the search results and prevents it from showing a mix of both “post” and “article” results. By forcing Google to be specific, you’re forcing Google to show more search results.
Competitor Search
Competitor’s Brand Name site:.com “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.net “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.org “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.edu “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.io “sponsored post” etc.
Pure Awareness Building With Zero Internet Presence
This method of getting the word out is pure gold, especially for B2B but also for professional businesses such as in the legal niches. There are organizations and associations that print magazines or send out newsletters to thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of people who are an exact match for the people you want to build top of mind brand name recognition with.
Emails and magazines do not have links and that’s okay. The goal is to build name brand recognition with positive associations. What better way than getting interviewed in a newsletter or magazine? What better way than submitting an article to a newsletter or magazine?
Don’t Forget PDF Magazines
Not all magazines are print, many magazines are in the form of a PDF. For example, I subscribe to a surf fishing magazine that is entirely in a proprietary web format that can only be viewed by subscribers. If I were a fishing company, I would make an effort to meet some of article authors, in addition to the publishers, at fishing industry conferences where they appear as presenters and in product booths.
This kind of outreach is in-person, it’s called relationship building.
Getting back to the industry organizations and associations, this is an entire topic in itself and I’ll follow up with another article, but many of the techniques covered in this guide will work with this kind of brand building.
Using the filetype search operator in combination with the TLD segmentation will yield some of these kinds of brand building opportunities.
1. Segment the search for opportunities search by TLD .net/.com/.org/.us/.edu, etc. Segmenting by TLD will help you discover different kinds of brand building opportunities. Websites on a Dot Org domain often link to a site for different reasons than a Dot Com website. Dot org domains represent article writing projects, free links on a links page, newsletter article opportunity, and charity link opportunities, just to name a few.
2. Consider Segmenting Dot Com Searches The Dot Com TLD will yields an overabundance of search results, not all of them useful. This makes it imperative to segment the results to find all available opportunities. Even if you’re
Ways to segment the Dot Com are by:
A. Kinds of sites (blog/shopping related keywords/product or service keywords/forum/etc.) This is pretty straightforward. If you’re looking for brand mentions be sure to add keywords to the searches that are directly relevant to what your business is about. If your site is about car injuries then sites about cars as well as specific makes, models, and kinds of automobiles are how you would segment a .com search
B. Context – Audience Relevance Not Keyword Match Context of a sponsored article is important. This is not about whether the website content matches what your site, business, product, or service are about. What’s important is to identify if the audience reach is an exact match to the audience that will be interested in your product, business, or service.
C. Quality And Authoritativeness This is not about third-party metrics related to links. This is just about making a common sense judgment about whether a site where you want a mention is well-regarded by those who are likely to be interested in your brand. That’s it.
Takeaway
The thing I want you to walk away with is that it’s useful to just tell people about a site and to get as many people as possible aware of it. Identify opportunities for ways to get them to tell a friend. There is no better recommendation than the one you can get from a friend or from a trusted organization. This is the true source of authoritativeness and popularity.
Anchor text, which is also known as link text, is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink. It usually appears in a different color and is often underlined. Good anchor text tells readers what to expect when they click and gives search engines valuable context about the linked page. Getting your anchor text right helps users navigate your content more easily, improves your internal link structure, and provides search engines with clues about your page relationships, which can positively influence your SEO.
Table of contents
Key takeaways
Anchor text enhances user navigation and provides context for search engines, improving SEO outcomes.
Good anchor text clearly describes the linked content and avoids misleading or over-optimized phrases.
Different types of anchor text exist, each with specific use cases; mix them for variety and clarity.
Yoast SEO offers tools to analyze competing links and improve anchor text for better search engine ranking.
To enhance anchor text, ensure it matches the linked content, flows naturally, and clearly signals clickable links.
What does an anchor text look like?
Anchor text is the part of a link that describes the linked page. It guides both readers and search engines toward relevant information. For example, if we link to our post about keyword research tools, the phrase “keyword research tools” is the anchor text.
The first part is the URL, while the second, the visible text, is the anchor text. Ideally, the words you choose should naturally describe the content on the linked page.
Why are link/anchor texts important?
Links are vital for SEO. They show how your pages connect and help search engines understand your site structure. The anchor text in those links provides extra context.
When Google crawls your site, it uses link text as a clue to what each linked page is about. If multiple links all use the same focus keyphrase, Google might not know which page should rank highest for that topic, leading to competition between your own pages.
That’s why thoughtful, descriptive anchor text matters. It helps search engines interpret your site and helps readers decide whether a link is worth clicking. Over-optimized or misleading link text can confuse both.
Tip: Avoid using your main focus keyphrase in multiple anchor texts within one post, as it can create competing links. Your linking should always feel natural and avoid over-optimization.
An example of internal links with good anchor texts
Different kinds of anchor text
Anchor text applies to both internal and external links. External sites can link to your content in various ways, and each type sends a different signal to search engines:
Branded links: Use your brand name as anchor text (e.g., Yoast)
If Yoast SEO detects that one of your links contains your focus keyphrase or a synonym of it, then Premium users get a warning. The reason? You don’t want multiple pages trying to rank for the same phrase.
For example, say your focus keyphrase is potato chips. If you link to another page using that exact phrase, Yoast SEO will flag it as a competing link. You’ll see a notification in your SEO analysis, so you can adjust it before publishing. If you have Yoast SEO Premium or Yoast SEO for Shopify, the check will also look for the synonyms of your keyphrase.
The competing links check in Yoast SEO helps you improve your linking
How to improve your anchor link texts
If Yoast SEO alerts you about competing links, or if you simply want to improve the quality of your link text, here are some best practices to follow.
1. Create a natural flow
Your writing should feel effortless. If a link feels awkward or forced into a sentence, it probably doesn’t belong there. Always prioritize readability, as a smooth flow improves both engagement and SEO. For more advice on writing content that feels natural while still ranking well, read our SEO copywriting guide.
2. Match the link text to the linked content
Readers should immediately understand what to expect when they click on a link. For example, a link that says meta description should lead to a post explaining what a meta description is and how to optimize it. Clear, logical linking builds trust and helps users navigate your content with ease.
3. Don’t trick your readers
Never mislead readers with inaccurate or confusing link text. If your link text says, “potato chips,” it shouldn’t lead to a page about cars. Consistent and honest linking keeps readers engaged and signals quality to search engines.
4. Make it clear that the link is clickable
Use visual cues such as color contrast or underlining, so it’s easy to tell when text is a link. This not only improves usability but also helps people using assistive technology to navigate your content. To see more on writing accessible, well-structured posts, visit our blogging guide.
5. Bonus tip: put your entire keyphrase in quotes
When using long tail keyphrases, you might see a warning about links that include parts of your focus keyphrase. To avoid this, put your full keyphrase in quotes, for example, “learning how to knit.” This tells Yoast SEO to look for the entire phrase rather than matching individual words.
If you’d like to learn more about writing effective link text and improving your content for SEO, take our SEO copywriting course, which is included with Yoast SEO Premium.
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But internal links work best when you write good anchor text for them. Each link should serve a clear purpose and guide readers naturally to related topics. Avoid adding unnecessary or irrelevant links just for the sake of having more connections.
Thoughtful internal linking improves the user experience and helps search engines understand your site’s structure, which is essential for strong SEO performance.
This is anchor text
Anchor text remains a small but powerful element of SEO. It helps users decide whether to click, gives search engines valuable context, and supports a logical site structure.
Keep your anchor text relevant, natural, and transparent and avoid manipulative or over-optimized linking practices. Search engines are now smarter than ever at spotting unnatural links, especially in the era of AI and semantic understanding.
So stay genuine, link with intent, and use Yoast SEO to guide you along the way.
Brendan is a seasoned writer with a particular interest in SMEs. What he really enjoys is being able to provide real, actionable steps that can be taken today to start making business better for everyone.
I hate to brag, but I will say I’m extremely proud to have placed 4th in the G50 SEO World Championships this past week.
I’m speaking at NESS, the global News & Editorial SEO Summit, on October 22. Growth Memo readers get 20% off when code “kevin2025”
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Historically, backlinks have always been one of the most reliable currencies of visibility in search results.
We know links matter for visibility in AI-based search, but how they work inside LLMs – including AI Overviews, Gemini, or ChatGPT & Co.- is still somewhat of a black box.
The rise of AI search models changes the rules of organic visibility and the competition for share of voice in LLM results.
So the question is, do backlinks still earn visibility in AI-based modalities of search… and if so, which ones?
If backlinks were the currency of the pre-LLM web, this week’s analysis is a first look at whether they’re still legal tender in the new AI search economy.
Together with Semrush, I analyzed 1,000 domains and their AI mentions against core backlink metrics.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
The data surfaced four clear takeaways:
Backlink-earned authority helps, but it’s not everything.
Link quality outweighs volume.
Most surprisingly, nofollow links pull real weight.
Image links can move the needle on authority.
These findings help us all understand how AI models surface sites, along with exposing what backlink levers marketers can pull to influence visibility.
Below, you’ll find the methodology, deeper data takeaways, and, for premium subscribers, recommendations (with benchmarks) to put these findings into action.
Methodology
For this analysis, I looked at relationships between AI mentions for 1,000 randomly selected web domains. All data is from the Semrush AI SEO Toolkit, Semrush’s AI visibility & search analytics platform.
Along with the Semrush team, I examined the number of mentions across:
ChatGPT.
ChatGPT with Search activated.
Gemini.
Google’s AI Overviews.
Perplexity.
(If you’re wondering where Claude.ai fits in this analysis, we didn’t include it at this time as its user base is generally less focused on web search and more on generative tasks.)
For the platforms above, we measured Share of Voice and the number of AI mentions against the following backlink metrics:
In this analysis, I used two different ways of measuring correlation across the data: a Pearson correlation and a Spearman correlation.
If you are familiar with these concepts, skip to the next section where we dive into the results.
For everyone else, I’ll break these down so you have a better understanding of the findings below.
Both Pearson and Spearman are correlation coefficients – numbers between -1 and +1 that measure how strongly two different variables are related.
The closer the coefficient is to +1 or -1, the more likely and stronger the correlation. (Near 0 means weak or no correlation at all.)
Pearson’s r measures the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables. Pearson looks at a linear correlation across the data using the raw values. This way of measuring is sensitive to outliers. But, if the relationship curves or has thresholds, Pearson under-measures it.
Spearman’s ρ (rho) measures the strength and direction of a monotonic relationship, or whether values consistently move in the same or opposite direction, not necessarily in a straight line. Spearman looks at rank correlation across the data. It asks whether higher X tends to come with higher Y; Spearman correlation asks: “When one thing increases, does the other usually increase too?”. It’s a correlation that is more robust to outliers and accounts for non-linear, monotonic patterns.
A gap between Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients can mean the gains are non-linear.
In other words: There’s a threshold to cross. And that means the effect of X on Y doesn’t kick in right away.
Examining both the Pearson and Spearman coefficients can tell us if nothing (or very little) happens until you pass a certain point – and then once you exceed that point, the relationship shows up strongly.
Here’s a quick example of what an analysis that involves both coefficients can reveal:
Spending $500 (action X) on ads might not move the needle on sales growth (outcome Y). But once you cross, say, $5,000/month (action X), sales start growing steadily (outcome Y).
And that’s the end of your statistics lesson for today.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
The first signal we examined was the strength of the relationship between the number of backlinks a site gets versus its AI Share of Voice.
Here’s what the data showed:
Authority Score has a moderate link to Share of Voice (SoV): Pearson ~0.23, Spearman ~0.36.
Higher authority means higher SoV, but the gains are uneven. There’s a threshold you need to cross.
Authority supports visibility, yet it does not explain most of the variance. What this means is that backlinks do have an impact on AI visibility, but there is more to the story, like your content, brand perceptions, etc.
Also, the number of unique linking domains matters more than the total number of backlinks.
In plain terms, your site is more likely to have a larger SoV when you have links from many different websites than a huge number of links from just a few sites.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Across all models, the strongest relationship occurred between Authority Score (0.65 Pearson, 0.57 Spearman) and the number of mentions
Authority Score is our compound metric that grades the overall quality of a website or a webpage. The higher the score, the more assumed weight a domain’s or webpage’s outbound links to another site could have.
It takes into account the number and quality of backlinks, organic traffic to link source pages, and the spamminess of the link profile.
Of course, Ascore is just a proxy for quality. LLMs have their own way of arriving at backlink quality. But the data shows that we can use Semrush’s Ascore as a good representative.
Most models value this metric equally for mentions, but ChatGPT Search and Perplexity value it the least compared to the average.
Surprisingly, regular ChatGPT (without search activated) weighs Ascore the most out of all models.
Critical to know: Median mentions jump from ~21.5 in decile 8 to ~79.0 in decile 9. The relationship is non-linear. In other words, the biggest gains come when you hit the upper boundaries of authority, or Ascore in this case.
(For context, a decile is a way of splitting a dataset into 10 equal parts. Each segment, or decile, contains 10% of the data points when they’re sorted in order.)
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Perhaps the most significant finding from this analysis is that it doesn’t matter much if the links are set to nofollow or not!
And this has huge implications.
Confirmation of the value of nofollow links is so important because these types of links tend to be easier to build than follow links.
This is where LLMs are distinctly different from search engines: We’ve known for a while that Google also counts nofollow links, but not how much and for what (crawling, ranking, etc).
Once again, you won’t see big gains until you’re in the top 3 deciles, or the top 30% of the data points.
Follow links → Mentions:
Pearson 0.334, Spearman 0.504
Nofollow links → Mentions:
Pearson 0.340, Spearman 0.509
Conversely, Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity weighed regular links the highest and nofollow links the least.
And interestingly, Gemini and ChatGPT weigh nofollow links the highest (over regular follow links).
Here’s my own theory as to why Gemini and ChatGPT weigh nofollow more:
With Gemini, I’m curious if Google weighs nofollow links higher than we have believed them to be in the past. And with ChatGPT, my hypothesis is that Bing is also weighing nofollow links higher (once Google started doing it, too). But this is just a theory, and I don’t have the data to support it at this time.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Beyond text-based backlinks, we also tested if image-based backlinks carry the same weight.
And in some cases, they had a stronger relationship to mentions than text-based links.
But how strong?
Images vs mentions: Pearson 0.415, Spearman 0.538
Text links vs mentions: Pearson 0.334, Spearman 0.472
Image links really start to pay off once you already have some authority.
From mid decile tiers up, the relationship turns positive, then strengthens, and is strongest in the top deciles.
In low-Ascore deciles (deciles 1 and 2), the images → mentions tie is weak or negative.
If you are targeting mention growth on Perplexity or Search-GPT, image links are especially productive.
Images correlate with mentions most on Perplexity and Search-GPT (Spearman ≈ 0.55 and 0.53), then ChatGPT/Gemini (≈ 0.49 – 0.52), then Google-AI (≈ 0.46).
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
Let’s reminisce for a moment. Do you remember how, back in 2020, we all obsessed over “link juice” and PageRank flow as far as internal links are concerned?
In 2025, what matters more is how your internal links define the entities and relationships on your site.
Internal linking is no longer just about distributing authority. It’s about:
Building your own semantic map that Google can trust.
Reinforcing your topical authority.
Earning a place in an AI-search-forward landscape.
And most internal linking guides treat links as simple “traffic routers,” ignoring their role in building entity context.
So today, yes, I’m revisiting some of the basic building blocks of SEO, but we’re going to expand how we think about internal linking.
If you’re already deep into entity-first SEO and apply it to your internal linking tactics, skip ahead to the action items to ensure you’re implementing it well.
For everyone else, I’ll explain why tightening up your internal linking structure isn’t just table stakes. It’s one of the simplest core levers to influence organic visibility.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
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Internal linking is the age-old SEO practice of connecting one page on your site to another page, all on the same domain.
These links act like the roads or highways that guide users through your content. But they also help search engines understand how your pages relate.
In the past, we thought about internal links as “pipes” for PageRank.
Add enough links from your homepage or other strong, well-ranking pages, and you’d push authority toward the URLs you wanted to rank.
That view isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete.
Today, internal links aren’t just distributing authority. They’re defining the semantic structure of your site.
Internal linking isn’t simply a practice that routes people (and bots/crawlers) to the pages you want them to go to.
In fact, when we think about internal linking this way is exactly when we start to half-ass the practice or let it sit on the back burner.
The words you use in anchor text and the way you connect hubs of related content all signal to search engines: These are the entities your brand wants to be known for.
Strategic internal linking can do three critical things for your site:
Reinforce entity authority. You’re signaling to Google, and everyone else, which concepts you want associated with your brand.
Improve index stability. Pages that are well-linked internally are more likely to be crawled often – and that means they stay indexed and are likely to show up in AI-generated results. (This is especially for Bing optimization, which seems to struggle more with indexing than Google. Bing is often forgotten when it comes to AEO/GEO because everyone assumes ChatGPT only uses Google, but it doesn’t.)
Drive user engagement. Smart placement and descriptive anchors help users explore more of your related content, increasing engagement signals.
Put simply: Internal links aren’t just SEO plumbing. They’re how you build a discoverable, authoritative entity graph inside your own site.
Generative AI being infused into all modalities of search means Google and LLMs aren’t just hiking all over the web searching for crawlable/indexable pages — search engines and LLMs are mapping relationships between entities and judging your brand’s authority accordingly.
But currently, there’s some disagreement on whether or not LLMs can navigate your site through internal links.
My hypothesis? LLMs do form entity relationships via your strategic use of internal links. But probably not through traditionally “crawling” them like search engines do, and more purely based on text signals on the page.
And if that turns out to be true – keeping in mind that LLMs often use search engine results to ground themselves – internal linking also benefits LLM optimization/AEO/GEO mostly by improving Google/Bing ranks, which LLMs heavily rely on.
I dropped the question over on LinkedIn, you can check out the discussion there. But a few responses stood out. (Take a look at the full thread, but I also highly recommend following these pros to learn more from each of them.)
Dan Petrovic, founder and CEO of Dejan SEO, gave a detailed answer about the differences between a) the types of LLM crawlers and b) the different LLMs and how they behave.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Lily Grozeva, head of SEO at Verto Digital, rightfully called out that we can all get the answer in our own logfiles.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Chee Lo, head of SEO at Trustpilot, shared his experience with Perplexity, which seems to be a bit more aggressive than other bots.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Sites with clear internal linking patterns that mirror how humans connect concepts are (in theory, more data will tell over time) better positioned to be included in AI-generated answers and entity-rich snippets.
Entities are semantic, interconnected objects that help machines to understand explicit and implicit language. In simpler terms, they are words (nouns) that represent any type of object, concept, or subject … According to Cindy Krum and her fantastic entity series, Google seems to restructure its whole approach to indexing based on entities (while you’re at it, read AJ Kohn’s article about embeddings). Understanding entities and how Google uses them in search sharpens our standards for content creation, optimization, and the use of schema markup.
Entities are nouns like events, ideas, people, places, etc. They’re the building blocks of ideas and how those ideas relate to each other. (They’re not just “keywords.”)
Search engines and LLMS use semantic relationships between entities to (1) reduce ambiguity, (2) reinforce authority/canonical sources on your site, and (3) map out relationships between topics, features, services, and audiences across your site.
When you internally link pages together with strategically descriptive anchors, you’re telling search engines how your site fits together … and you’re training them on how entities across your site connect.
Therefore, by practicing internal linking through an entity-based lens, you’re creating stronger, clearer relationships and patterns for Google/search engines/LLMs to understand.
Entity-first SEO starts with defining the people, products, concepts, and places your brand “owns.”
If you’re a B2B SaaS company offering a CRM, those entities might include your:
Core product (CRM platform).
Features (pipeline management, email automation, reporting dashboards).
Use cases (sales enablement, customer support, marketing teams).
Personas/target ICPs (heads of sales at mid-market companies, startup founders scaling revenue teams, or enterprise IT buyers).
Taking this example, you’re going to think in terms of topic-first SEO:
Hub or pillar pages = parent entities. These are your central nodes – the definitive resource on a core concept. For a B2B SaaS CRM, it might be the CRM platform overview page.
Cluster pages = sub-entities. These are the supporting nodes that expand on the hub. For a CRM, the CRM hub branches into feature pages like pipeline management, email automation, and reporting dashboards.
Cross-link clusters to show relatedness. Don’t just point everything back to the hub – connect the clusters to each other to model real-world relationships. In the instance of the CRM, pipeline management integrates with email automation to shorten deal cycles.
Navigation and breadcrumbs reinforce hierarchy. The visible structure tells both users and Google how entities fit together. Example: Home → Products → CRM → Pipeline Management.
Include personas in the implementation. This reinforces the relationship: This persona → has this pain point → solved by this feature → within this product topic.
For example, look at this topic cluster map created with Screaming Frog:
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
It shows two clusters with nodes very close together (red and orange) and three other clusters that are spread apart (green, blue, and purple). Guess which clusters outperform the others in organic search? Red and orange!
Here’s how you connect those entities into a meaningful structure in the copy on the page:
1. Anchor text = entity disambiguation.
Instead of linking with vague text, use descriptive anchors that clarify which entity the link refers to. For example, if your CRM has a feature page about pipeline management, link to it with “sales pipeline management CRM feature” language.
2. Consistency matters.
If you always link to that pipeline management page with variations like “pipeline automation tool,” “deal tracking software,” and “CRM feature,” you dilute the entity connection. (But variations like “pipeline management tool,” “sales pipeline management CRM feature,” and “pipeline management features” are derivatives.)
By sticking to clear, consistent anchors, you signal to Google that this is the page that defines “pipeline management” for your brand.
3. Context strengthens meaning.
The sentence or paragraph around the link can add semantic weight. For example:
“Our CRM includes pipeline management, so your sales team can track every deal from prospecting to close.”
That tells Google (and users) that pipeline management isn’t just a phrase; it’s a core feature within the CRM product.
4. Include personas.
Making personas a criterion for internal linking is a no-brainer, because from a psychological perspective, a link automatically signals “there’s more for you here.”
If your internal link is placed on the right word that triggers a response in your target ICPs (and the right areas of the page), it increases the chance of people staying on the site. It’s also just a better experience – and good customer service – to help site visitors find the right offering specifically for themselves, all with the goal to increase trust and the chances they take an action or convert.
If one of your ICPs is head of Sales at mid-market SaaS companies, you might internally link from a blog article like “10 Ways SaaS Sales Leaders Can Shorten Their Sales Cycle” directly to your pipeline management feature page, while using copy surrounding that link that explains how your offering solves this problem. That link makes the relationship explicit: This is the feature that solves this persona’s pain point.
Ultimately, think of every internal link as a connector in your brand’s knowledge graph.
Together, these links show how entities and topics (like CRM platform → pipeline management → sales enablement → head of sales persona) relate to each other, and why your site is authoritative on them.
Amanda Johnson jumping in here to add: Basically, show + tell people (and search engines/LLMs) what you want them to know via literal semantics. It really is that simple. No need to overthink this. Use clear, descriptive, accurate anchor text for the internally linked page, use it consistently, and give context as to how/why the page is linked there with surrounding copy.
Ultimately, if you practice internal linking thoughtfully and methodically, you end up with a better user experience and more thorough reinforcement of internal entity relationships (which can improve topical authority signals).
Worried that your most important pages aren’t getting enough visibility because you haven’t set up a clear linking structure? Following the guidance above will help you resolve this and set up a clear internal linking system.
And using tools that have internal link auditing (like Semrush, Ahrefs, Clearscope, Surfer, etc.) will help you implement your system. Some SEO tools also give page-level internal linking recommendations and copy suggestions to anchor the text to.
Internal linking hasn’t just been about crawlability for some time now.
By structuring links around topics, entities, (and even user journeys of your target personas), you communicate your site’s semantic map to Google and LLMs.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
Build the Authority You Need for AI-Driven Visibility
Struggling to get backlinks, even when your content is solid?
You’re not alone. With Google’s AI Overviews and generative search dominating the results, traditional link-building tactics just don’t cut it anymore.
It’s time to earn the trust that boosts your brand’s visibility across Google, ChatGPT, and AI search engines.
Join Kevin Rowe, Founder & Head of Digital PR Strategy at PureLinq, on August 27, 2025, for an exclusive webinar. Learn the exact strategies Kevin’s team used to earn 1,000+ links and how you can replicate them without needing a massive budget or PR team.
What You’ll Learn:
How to identify media trends where your expertise is in demand.
How to craft a story angle journalists will want to share.
Why This Webinar is Essential:
Earned links and citations are now key to staying visible in AI search results. This session will provide you with a proven, actionable playbook for boosting your SEO visibility and building the authority you need to succeed in this new era.
Register today to get the playbook for link-building success. Can’t attend live? Don’t worry, sign up anyway, and we’ll send you the full recording.
Backlinks remain essential for organic search visibility, yet link-building opportunities are increasingly rare. Most tactics are either risky or ineffective. Those that work well — digital public relations, direct outreach — are often too expensive or time-consuming for small and medium-sized businesses.
But one link-building method is both inexpensive and effective: being quoted in online publications as an expert. This method produces backlinks and builds topical authority.
The tactic is “entity-driven” because it helps the quoted expert become an “entity,” i.e., a brand. Traditionally, the tactic involved laborious manual outreach to editors and writers offering expertise for articles.
There are now platforms to simplify the process. All connect publications with experts. None promote paid links or placements as far as I know.
Here are three options.
Featured
Featured is a freemium platform listing requests from publications seeking expertise. Any account holder can submit quotes in response. Account holders can be either publications or individuals, allowing them to request and submit quotes from a single account.
To be cited and linked:
Submit your expert quotes to the requests.
Suggest relevant questions based on your expertise, assisting publications with ideas.
Respond to publications seeking writers.
Create a profile to attract publications looking for interviews.
When submitting a quote, provide your attribution to help ensure a proper citation.
Account holders can submit up to three quotes for free each month. Premium packages start at $19 per month for 10 quotes.
Featured recently acquired HARO (Help A Reporter Out), an established and robust database of publications and reporters seeking experts.
Featured allows account holders to complete a profile and submit three responses per month for free. Click image to enlarge.
Source of Sources
HARO’s founder has launched Source of Sources to connect journalists with experts. It’s a newsletter listing categorized requests for quotes. The format is easy to scan and click requests to determine the topic and need.
Source of Sources is free, but it requires manual monitoring of requests. There is no dashboard to track submitted quotes, statuses, and deadlines.
Sources of Sources is a newsletter listing categorized requests from journalists for quotes. Click image to enlarge.
Journo.com
Journo.com is a freemium platform connecting reporters with expert sources. Reporters can submit quote requests without creating an account.
Experts require an account, which is free for 20 monthly responses and a dashboard to submit and monitor those responses. Paid plans start at $99 per month for 100 responses and 200 News Searches — a tool to find relevant outlets for PR campaigns.
Journo.com’s free plan allows experts to respond to 20 quote requests per month via a dashboard. Click image to enlarge.
There might be a little bit of outreach necessary, especially if you need to fan the flames, but the main goal is to get media outlets, niche websites, industry publications, and bloggers to link to you naturally.
With a bit of creativity, strategic marketing, and a hands-on approach, this can be achieved.
Below, you’ll find some of the methods we’ve recommended and tested, but with variations to maintain client confidentiality.
These strategies can be modified for just about any niche or industry, and can work effectively for publishers, ecommerce, service providers/lead gen, and apps.
It is all about proper execution. If you take shortcuts or use templates and mass emails, you’ll likely not succeed.
But before diving in, here are the things we do not recommend to clients. These either fail to deliver results or work until you get caught and then you get penalized if you cannot offset them with good links.
Guest posting for backlinks (absolutely okay for PR and customer acquisition).
Scholarships and grants.
Forum commenting.
Social media profiles.
Parasite SEO, where you give yourself backlinks.
Instead, you can do this to rank the site for phrases, but the pages won’t pass authority. They can send you traffic, though.
PBNs, Link Farms, Webrings, Link Rings, Roundups.
Link exchanges or reciprocal links (with some exceptions).
Paying for high DA sites that also link to “Payday, Porn, Pills, Poker” niches.
Hire Someone Or Offer Services For Publicity
Think about something your audience needs or loves directly related to your products or services.
Or, think about something your audience needs a solution for that you and your staff can provide.
One example of this can be a travel company that pays people to travel the world and blog about it (I share non-travel ideas afterward).
Yes, they get content for their sites, but the value of the copy diminishes once the person’s trip ends.
If the traveler builds a following and the following reads your blog, they might leave when the person does, especially if the next author cannot connect with them.
So, why use this as a link building strategy?
It plays into people’s aspirations and emotions. When you tap into emotions like laughter, anger, jealousy, ambition, empathy, sympathy, etc., you inspire action.
People dream of traveling the world. A chance to get paid to do it for simply writing about your journey – sign them up!
Bloggers, media companies, and others are likely to write about it and link to the campaign, but you need to do the work of getting the word out. Here’s how:
Email and SMS your customers to let them know about the opportunity.
Run social media ads to the public using interests and demographics for targeting.
Add a specific ad group for people who work in the media and contribute to get your content in front of the right eyes.
Sponsor a booth at a tradeshow for the industry where you advertise your service and the job opportunity. In this case, it could be TBEX, which is for travel bloggers, and Taste Maker, for food bloggers.
List it on the job boards and see if it gains interest and shares.
Once you find a platform that generates buzz, keep pushing it as you’re looking for the virality.
There is one catch: You will need to do more link building later, as this is a one-time acquisition campaign.
The good news: You can learn from this campaign and apply it to new ideas and strategies to keep the links coming in.
Now, let’s tweak this campaign for a local strategy while keeping the same theme.
Hosting Offline Events For Local SEO Backlinks
On my blog and at conferences, for people needing natural local backlinks, I’ve shared strategies for local businesses to host educational events or provide spaces.
The goal here is to keep something ongoing – whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly – so the existing links remain in place and new ones can develop.
It works for all types of local businesses, from retail stores and medspas to religious institutions and storage facilities.
Here are some examples:
Example 1: Medical practices can host a weekly or monthly closed event to teach parents and children how to administer injections for diabetes or allergy shots in emergencies, like anaphylactic shock.
It can also be community center volunteers who learn how to administer Narcan for overdoses and detect specific types of overdoses to apply the correct treatment.
Example 2: Anyone with space and a slow night each week can host meetups and groups like group therapy or Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), knitting or crafting circles for widows or people who just moved to the area and are lonely, or a safe space for studying after school when parents have to work.
Doing something good for a community or group with a need is rewarding on its own. As a bonus, it can be a media-worthy pitch when they need a feel-good story for PR.
Example 3: Organize pop-up events, including animal adoptions, local designers, crafters, or bakers, to display for a day or a week.
By hosting a new pop-up, even if it is the same repeating theme, your business becomes a go-to resource for community engagement.
These complementary brands send social media signals and traffic to your store, bring in new customers as they announce the pop-up, and get citations as people want to know how they can grow or discover new things in their cities.
Slow nights and extra space provide the perfect opportunity to get backlinks.
Once your event gains traction, you can reach out to other companies and non-profits whose audiences would benefit.
In the medical example above, reach out to pediatricians’ and physicians’ offices. For community meetings, collaborate with religious institutions or government websites that link to local community resources or schools for the same reasons.
The goal is to create something media-worthy at the event, or an initiative that inspires people to mention your company over others.
This works for niche companies that can be local, national, or international, such as SEO tool providers and SaaS solutions.
It also works for mining and lumber companies or local restaurants and chains. For marketing agencies, performers like singers and actors, and even a veterinary practice.
Here are some examples:
Example 1: Every city has dog meetups or races. Here in DC, we have the annual Chihuahua races around Cinco de Mayo and the Drag Queen High Heel race around Halloween.
For the dog races or meetups, sponsor a couple of the pooches and dress them in costumes with your URL on them. Everyone loves a puppy in costume, and that URL makes its way around the images.
Same with sponsoring a drag queen. Give her a sash or title featuring your company name and/or URL. Take it a step further by sponsoring a drag queen at other events for photo ops, like a drag race, an eating competition, or something unexpected (as long as she is safe).
Example 2: Conferences have media companies, bloggers, and coverage like crazy. Think about your booth and the PR stunts you can do within your industry.
Some booths bring in celebrities, and everyone wants to take their photo with them. These booths also get mentioned in the conference roundups and you can ask for backlinks.
Other times, it’s being creative, like creating an arcade, setting up a beauty salon, or doing IV hydration drips.
The added bonus to the beauty salon and IV drip (I’ve seen this at shows, and it was awesome) is that you get a captive audience of potential customers.
Being Listed As A Service Provider
This applies mostly to brick-and-mortar businesses, but may work for some ecommerce sites and service providers as well.
Think about what your customers and potential users do, and where you fit into their lives.
For example, if you’re a restaurant in a city, you want locals, business people, and tourists. So, citation links are already on your radar, but what about usage and recommended service provider links?
I live in Washington, DC. If I’m planning on going to the theatre, I’ll probably want drinks or dinner beforehand.
If I’m from out of town and in DC to see a show, I’ll probably want a hotel nearby.
This is where you can get a lot of solid backlinks. Type “restaurants near National Theater,” “hotels near arena stage,” or “places for drinks near Kennedy Center.”
Each of these queries brings up the theater’s own website, things to do in DC results, and some directories.
These are easy backlinks to get and can bring customers through your door. Double bonus. It’s the exact type of link that can help grow your business.
Now, look for convention centers, conferences, annual pop culture events, and other things happening in your city or nationally.
There will be fan sites, reviews, guides on what to do, trade publications, and associations that all provide resources around these.
By getting on their radar, you can get backlinks from them, with potential customers spending money on your products and services.
Final Thoughts
The ultimate goal of advanced link building is to bring links to your site organically, minimizing the need for manual outreach while acquiring more quality links at scale.
The techniques outlined above tend to have a snowball effect when done well, or build enough authority that you become a recognized brand and entity related to your products and services.
Once this happens, your rankings begin to stabilize, and you should find that you attract more links naturally.
Link building is a complicated art form with many different tactics and approaches.
Despite being one of the most mature processes in SEO, there’s still much disagreement about what makes a “bad” or “good” link building strategy, including effectiveness vs. risk, and what tactics Google can detect or punish a website for.
This post will help you determine what to avoid when link building or vetting the tactics of a new service provider.
I’m not going to claim to put any disagreements to rest, and if you’re a particularly experiment-minded SEO you might find this post a little on the conservative side.
As with all things in the industry, there’s inconsistency between what Google says and what works, and everyone benefits from those who experiment and push boundaries.
But I’m taking a conservative approach that follows Google’s guidelines closely for two core reasons:
This post is for readers looking for reliable and sustainable strategies. I don’t advise that you use experimental or high-risk tactics when it comes to link building if you don’t already know what you’re doing and what the risks are.
You should take the guidelines as a statement of intent, not absolute or current truth. Even if a link building tactic that goes against Google’s guidelines works now, there is reason to believe that Google intends to address it.
Types Of Unnatural Links
A an unnatural link is any link that is created for the purposes of manipulating search engines or that violates Google’s spam policies.
The following are some of the most common types of unnatural links.
Buying Or Selling Links
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with paying for a link or exchanging some kind of product or service for a link as long as the nature of the relationship is disclosed and the links are not for SEO purposes.
Buying, exchanging, or trading for links for SEO is the problem. Links for SEO are supposed to be a choice influenced only by the content on the page.
If your content is highly valued and people choose to link to it for that reason, then you deserve SEO benefits.
When you enter money or value exchanges into that dynamic, it breaks the ideal purpose of SEO links and introduces a high potential for manipulation. In such cases, Google requires marking the link as rel=nofollow or rel=sponsored so that the links do not pass SEO value. As long as you or the parties linking to you do this, for the most part, there’s no problem.
Here is an example of implementing nofollow and sponsored attributes:
Another way to buy links is to pay someone to create them for you. In this case, a service provider does that work of creating assets, reaching out to acquire links, or both. As long as this service provider doesn’t engage in shady tactics of their own and doesn’t give you links on domains that they own, this is totally fine.
Keep in mind that the “buying” and “selling” definitions are not limited to an exchange of currency.
It describes any kind of relationship where something is exchanged for a link, like a product.
If a party receives enough value to reasonably change their behavior, a material connection must be disclosed.
A pen or a t-shirt likely won’t change behavior (unless received for the explicit purpose of reviewing / linking to it).
A direct payment for a link, a gift card, or a product with a high dollar value likely changes behavior and incentivizes a link.
An item loaned has different implications than an item given.
Consider the intended audience: if you’re giving things away for reasons other than to acquire links (for example as part of a conference attendance gift package), then disclosure might be necessary, but it might not be strictly necessary to ask all those people to mark links as sponsored if they choose to talk about it.
Consider whether a link relationship would be surprising: it makes sense that a movie reviewer might see a movie for free. It makes less sense that a tech reported would get to keep a laptop they’re reporting about without disclosure.
Link Exchange Agreements
Link exchanges are similar to buying links because they involve an exchange of value.
Mutual linking happens often, and when it occurs organically, it’s no problem. It makes perfect sense for some websites to link back and forth.
But you need to watch out for any kind of agreement. “Link for link” is a no-go, and if you do it often enough, it can become easy to spot.
The thing about links is that any time you give or get a link for a reason other than the value and relevance of the link itself, it’s easy to spot – likely easier than you think.
The occasional bit of back rubbing isn’t a big deal. When given a few different choices of websites to reference, it makes sense that people would choose those they already know or have existing relationships with.
That’s generally fine. The problem comes when you enter into specific agreements: You link to me, and I’ll link to you.
The video below explains the difference between a link that’s an editorial choice and a link that’s based on an agreement.
Private Blog Networks
Private blog networks (PBNs) are networks of sites created to artificially inflate the rankings of one specific central website.
Basically, one entity controls an entire network of websites and can use a few different specific linking methods to manipulate to pass authority and SEO value around.
This network can then be used to artificially inflate the rankings of other websites by linking out to them.
In order for this tactic to work, all the websites need to have relationships or be owned by the same entity.
This is a pretty clear violation of Google’s guidelines, and it’s also pretty easy to spot.
Sites that are part of these networks can be penalized, and if you’re a little too lax with user-generated content on your site, you could find yourself accidentally becoming one.
If you accept any kind of content from external parties, scrutinize it carefully, especially links. Skip down to “How To Spot Shady Links” to find out more.
Unnatural Links From Forums, Blog Comments, And Other User-Generated Content
User-generated content is tricky when it comes to links. Ideally, a random person loves your content so much that they use you as a reference. Not so ideal is faking it.
Comments, forums, blogs, guestbooks, and even sites like Reddit might be tempting sources for links, and in the right context, they can absolutely be part of a healthy backlink profile. You can even link to yourself if you’re genuinely engaging in a relevant discussion. Google doesn’t consider all comment links and UGC links to be spam.
However, it’s a bad idea to try and engineer these links as part of a mass strategy.
The first thing to keep in mind is that many user-generated content (UGC) websites have blanket nofollow attributes on outgoing links. It’s an old tactic, so many high-quality communities moderate UGC heavily. This means that doing this effectively requires effort. The big question to ask yourself is: does the comment add genuine value to the community?
Most commonly, people execute these links unnaturally using bots to post automatically. Generally, automated posting using bots isn’t exactly valuable, and you’ll be flagged and moderated out of those communities.
Automated Link Syndication
There are tons of ways to automate links, but Google considers automating links at scale to be spam.
There are plenty of ways to safely automate your content processes, but we aren’t talking about that. We’re talking about using automation to post content externally from your website purely to acquire SEO links.
From automated article spinners to bots that will post comments and social media posts, if you’re intentionally building links “at scale,” then the chances are high that you’re building toxic links.
This could look like an automated press release or directory posting. It could look like low-quality article directories, which are often filled with spammy content that is widely distributed.
Generative AI has enabled new forms of automation for links and content, so it’s important to consider the overall principles in Google’s and the FTC guidelines when you evaluate novel functions and strategies.
Links In Distributed Widgets
People sometimes engage in automated link building by adding links to widgets distributed to multiple websites. Google clarified its stance on this and provided examples of manipulative widgets.
This kind of link building is pretty easy to spot, and it’s pretty clear that these types of links don’t add value.
Using Expired Domains To Build Links
Expired domain abuse is another tactic Google is wise to, but that doesn’t stop people from trying it.
One way that expired domains can be used to build unnatural links is by purchasing it and then redirecting it to another website. The idea is that all of the authority and backlinks belonging to the expired domain will be forwarded through the redirect. Don’t do this.
Any Link Can Be Bad If It’s Lazy Enough
Does the automated press release spam mean you shouldn’t send press releases? No!
Does the prevalence of poor-quality directors mean you can’t use directories in a high-quality way? Also no!
This goes for many link building strategies. There’s usually a high-effort, valuable version and a low-effort, spammy version.
If you want to reach new audiences, you could send that post to a website with a large reach. It makes sense for that website to then link back to you as a reference for readers if they like your writing and want to learn more.
This is an ideal linking relationship. A website has chosen your content because it provides value to its readers and links to you as the source of the expertise.
But when one party turns lazy, this becomes toxic.
A website might decide that, for whatever reason, it makes sense to start allowing poor-quality content with links.
Maybe it starts charging or uses a big catalog of content to build an affiliate strategy.
On the other side, link builders might generate poor-quality content with links and post it on websites that either don’t mind or don’t know better. Or they might try and sneak them by following stricter editorial guidelines.
When one side of the equation gets lazy, guest posting becomes a manipulative linking strategy.
The Risk Of Manual Actions
The most likely risk of an unnatural link is that it will be a waste of time and/or money.
If you build a link for SEO that goes against Google’s guidelines, algorithms will simply ignore it either immediately or at an unspecified time in the future when they discover it.
If you have many toxic links and you’re using a strategy that the algorithms don’t immediately catch, this can open you up to a sudden reduction in SEO effectiveness.
At some point, Google will likely release an update that improves how the algorithms detect the links.
When that happens, if you have many of them, the adjustment can significantly impact your rankings and traffic. This can look like a targeted penalty, but generally, it isn’t.
Google uses automated systems and manual actions to punish toxic and spammy link building, but generally, you’re safe from this action unless you’re intentionally using these tactics on a large scale.
On the other hand, you can receive specific penalties for unnatural links, both coming to your site or going out from your site.
Unnatural links manual action notification in search console.
Links To Your Site Vs. Links From Your Site
If you host unnatural links from your site to other sites, you may be hit with a manual action. This indicates to Google that you’re on the supply side of the ecosystem it’s trying to stop.
A large number of unnatural links coming from your website could cause Google to decide it doesn’t trust you and issue a penalty. This will be communicated to you in Google Search Console. These penalties can be reversed, but generally this requires you to fix the problems and submit a request for reevaluation.
This video from Google about unnatural links from your site explains more. It’s your responsibility to ensure that your site does not host unnatural links. This video from Google provides a great overview. Remember: “A natural link is an editorial choice.”
For example, if you use your domains to host bad link tactics and sell links to others, you’re at a high risk of receiving a manual penalty from Google that suppresses or removes your website from the Search index.
You can also receive a manual penalty for unnatural links to your website. This seems less likely, because there are many cases where it wouldn’t be fair to punish a website for incoming links. However, you might still receive a manual penalty if Google is confident that you are trying to manipulate your ranking.
A good link is a genuine interaction of trust between two parties.
Spotting shady links is actually pretty easy, especially when there’s a pattern.
If you’re auditing your backlink profile or putting a potential service provider through their paces, here are some signs to look for.
1. New or young sites on blogging domains.
If you notice links from blogging subdomains ( e.g. blogger.com ) to your website, especially if they aren’t directly relevant, appear in high numbers (without nofollow attribute), or even in some cases where the blog has your website or brand name, this is a sign that someone was building shady links to your website.
This is a good indication of a PBN.
You should ask a link building service provider whether they create new websites to build links. This is a red flag.
2. Many unnatural links from unrelated forums.
Links like this can indicate automated link building with bots. Generally, using UGC sites to build links is against the terms of service of those websites.
Usually, the strategy involves pretending to be a genuine user. If you have to pretend you’re someone you’re not, it’s a shady link.
3. Links from irrelevant websites and directories.
Relevance really does matter with links, and if you’re looking through a link profile and see domains that just don’t make sense, they bear investigation. For example if you are a recipe publisher a link from plumber’s article is highly irrelevant. That means it was likely the result of an unnatural link building technique.
However, if you add your website to relevant directories that have value from the users’ perspective, this can be totally fine. For example, you should add your restaurant website to Yelp, which is used by 32M active users who look for reviews before booking a reservation. Check our list of directories that still matter.
If you want to learn more about link building and its many pitfalls, check out SEJ’s ebook The Dark Side Of Link Building.
