SEO

Links and mentions: what still counts, and what will cost you

Being mentioned by people who genuinely know you still matters. Buying links from people who do not is the fastest way to undo years of patient work, and the offers arrive in your inbox every week.

ByAlan Herbert3 November 20269 min read

The original idea behind search was that a link is a recommendation. If lots of people point at a page, it is probably worth reading.

That idea worked well enough that an entire industry grew up around manufacturing recommendations, which is why the offers land in your inbox every week promising hundreds of backlinks for a fixed monthly fee. It is also why search engines have spent twenty years getting better at telling the difference between a mention somebody meant and one somebody bought.

Links still count. What has changed is that the fakeable kinds have gone from being worth a little to being worth nothing, and in some cases worth less than nothing.

What genuinely counts

A link is worth something roughly in proportion to whether a real person, on a site with its own reason to exist, chose to point at you.

That means the useful ones are mostly things you are already involved in. The trade body you belong to. The suppliers and manufacturers whose sites list approved installers or stockists. The local paper, when you do something worth reporting. The club or event you sponsor. The charity you helped. The client who writes about a project you did together. The professional register or accreditation scheme.

Almost none of that looks like link building, which is precisely why it works.

Mentions without a link count too. Being named in an article, a podcast, a forum answer or a local Facebook group is a signal of its own, and it drives actual people to search for you, which is worth more than the link would have been.

What will cost you

The tactics on this list are not merely ineffective. They carry a genuine risk of a penalty, and recovering from one is far more expensive than never earning it.

Buying links, in any of its disguises: sponsored posts that do not disclose, paid placements on sites that exist to sell them, and packages sold by the hundred.

Private blog networks, meaning collections of sites that exist only to link to clients. They look plausible for a while and they get identified.

Mass guest posting, where the same article with the same anchor text appears on forty unrelated sites.

Directory blasts. Submission to hundreds of directories nobody reads. This one is particularly common in packages sold to small businesses, and it also tends to create the inconsistent listings that cause the local search problems described in the previous part of this series.

Reciprocal schemes, where a group agrees to link to each other in a circle.

Comment and forum spam, which is beneath a business with a name to protect.

The pattern is straightforward. If the link exists because of an arrangement rather than because somebody thought your page was worth pointing at, it is the kind search engines are trying to discount, and the more of them you have the more you look like a site that buys links.

The offer that arrives by email is never the good kind. Nobody with genuine relationships and real coverage needs to cold-email strangers about backlink packages. If a message promises a number of links, a timescale, or a guaranteed position, it is describing the fakeable kind. Judging those offers properly is a subject of its own, later in this series.

Earning them without it becoming a project

The honest version of this is slower and quite a lot easier than it sounds, because most of it is asking for credit you are already owed.

Ask the people you already work with. Suppliers with stockist pages, manufacturers with installer directories, trade bodies with member lists. A remarkable number of businesses are entitled to a listing they have never claimed. This is the highest-value hour available to most companies.

Tell the local paper when something is genuinely newsworthy. A new premises, an apprenticeship, an award, a community project. Local news outlets need stories and are far more approachable than national ones.

Sponsor the things you would sponsor anyway. The junior team, the village fete, the local charity run. Sponsorship pages link, and it is money you were spending for other reasons.

Publish something worth pointing at. Not an article about your services, but the thing you know that other people do not: the guide, the checklist, the explanation of a local regulation, the honest comparison. This is slow and it compounds.

Ask satisfied clients if they write about their projects. Many do, and they simply forget to mention who did the work.

Anchor text, briefly

The words used in a link matter, and the way to get it wrong is to control them too tightly.

Natural links say your business name, your web address, or something like “the company who did the work”. A run of links all reading exactly the same commercial phrase is one of the clearest signs of an arrangement, and it is the pattern that most often triggers trouble.

So do not send people a phrase to use. If somebody asks how to credit you, your name is the right answer.

The links you have complete control over are the ones between your own pages, and they are consistently under-used.

They help people find things, they help search engines understand which of your pages matter and how they relate, and they are frequently what gets a page indexed in the first place. When you publish something new, add links to it from the existing pages it relates to. When you write about a subject you have covered before, link back.

It takes minutes, there is no risk attached, and it is the only part of this article you can do entirely on your own.

Do you need to disavow anything?

Almost certainly not. There is a tool for telling Google to ignore links pointing at you, and for the overwhelming majority of businesses it should be left alone. Search engines discount the rubbish automatically now, and the tool is a blunt instrument that can do damage in unpractised hands.

The exception is if you have a known history of buying links, or you have received a manual penalty notice in Search Console. If neither applies, leave it.

Where to start

Write a list of every organisation you have a genuine relationship with: suppliers, bodies, accreditations, clients, the things you sponsor. Then check which of them already mention you, and ask the ones that do not.

That list is almost always longer than people expect, and every entry on it is the kind of link that cannot be bought.

If you are being pitched a link package and want a second opinion before you spend anything, get in touch, or read more about how we approach search.

Where these facts come from

The distinction between a genuine link and a manufactured one is set out by Google itself, and the policy is worth reading before buying anything.

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