Beginners Guide to Link Building

When learning about SEO, you would have come across the term link building. It’s one of the most important — and sometimes misunderstood — parts of growing your website’s visibility in Google search results. In simple terms, link building is about earning links from other websites back to yours. These links act like votes of confidence, showing Google that your content is trustworthy and valuable.

In this beginner’s guide, we’ll walk through what link building is, why it matters, and how you can get started with safe, effective strategies that build long-term SEO success.

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. Search engines use links to:

1. find content on the internet, crawling hyperlinks between websites and between individual pages on your website.

2. help identify how a page should rank in their search results pages.

If you think about links as being like votes, links tell Google that the page linked to is important. The more high quality backlinks a page has, the more likely Google is to rank it favorably, (also taking into account other page ranking features at the same time). However, not all links are equal. Links from reputable, relevant websites carry much more weight than links from low-quality or unrelated sources.

Why Is Link Building Important?

Link building is an important SEO strategy that helps to raise your search engine rankings. Links are a key signal to Google and other search engines that your content is valued by others, and links also help search engines to crawl your website to discover new and updated content. Key reasons include to:

Improve search rankings - backlinks are an important ranking factor in Google's algorithm. High quality backlinks are likely to help raise your SERPS rankings.
Grow referral traffic - you gain direct traffic from people who click on a link to your website from another.
Raise brand awareness and trust - being mentioned and linked to by trusted sources (blogs, directories, or news outlets) helps position your business as an expert in your niche.
Build relationships - outreaching to other businesses within your industry can help boost online and offline relationships which can benefit your business.

How to Get More Backlinks

There are four types of link building strategies: adding links, asking for links, earning links and buying links. The most valuable links are those which are earnt by having top quality content that people want to link to it naturally. The worst links are those which are purchased, as Google considers this as manipulating its algorithm, and will essentially rank your site low because of it. Let's take a look at each link building strategy individually:

1. Adding links

Adding links is when you add a link to your website on a website which is not yours. These are typically social media sites, business directory listings, online forum postings and review sites. Links from these sources are generally nofollow, which means the link is being signaled to Google as having not a lot of value, so that there is no page authority or ranking power given to the linked page. Or in other words, the original site the link is on is telling Google that it does not endorse the website that the link is pointing to.

2. Asking for links

Asking other website owners for links is another link building strategy. A link to your site may be shared if your content directly benefits the owner's audience and they want to give you credit for creating that content.

3. Earning links

Earning links mean that you do something so great that other websites link to your without you asking them to. For this to happen, you need to have created awesome content that resonates with audiences and that the other site feels strongly will be of benefit to their audiences.

4. Buying links

Gone are the days when you could buy links and benefit from their link juice. Do not buy links nowadays as paid links violate Google's link spam guidelines and you will likely get penalised for them.

Finding the Backlinks You Already Have

There are plenty of online tools available which can search and find the links that are directed to your website. These backlink checkers are often free, though they have limits set for their usage. Some of the free (limited usage and results) backlink tools available include:

After using one or more of these tools, you'll have results that contain key information that will help you with your link building strategy. This information is likely to include:

Backlink URL - the outside domain which the link is coming from
Anchor text - the hypertext that the link is coming from
Target URL - the URL on your website the link is directed to
Domain authority - the ranking strength of the originating domain
follow or nofollow - whether the referring domain sees value in the site linked to, and as such tells search engines

From this information, you can make decisions as to how 'good or bad' a backlink is, and take action accordingly. Remember that the majority of your backlinks are likely to have been automated and not from reputable sources, which you cannot stop occurring. This makes genuine backlinks even more desirable.

Good Links vs Bad Links - How to Know the Difference

Once you have identified the links that are directed at your website, it's time to identify which are good and which aren't. Good links are rewarded, while bad links can get you penalised.

Good backlinks:

fit naturally into written content
are links from websites in your industry, where the link makes sense to exist
send traffic who want content like yours to your website
are on websites which are reputable and have editorial standards

Bad backlinks:

use keyword stuffed text anchors
are located on spammy directories
are from link farms or PBNs which are networks existing just to sell links
are from websites not relevant to your industry
are found in low quality articles

You are likely to have both genuine and spammy backlinks. Bad backlinks, also known as toxic backlinks can lead to search engines ranking your website lower than if you did not have those toxic backlinks. Do you need to do anything about these? Can you even do anything about these?

It is not simple at all to have links to your website removed by the referring domain, as you don't have any control over what they have on their site. The exceptions would be websites that you have signed up to such as business directories, where you can remove or close your account.

Otherwise, you could ask the webmaster of the originating website to remove all links to your website, which is likely to be ignored by spammy sites. The only other option you have is to disavow it directly to search engines. Disavow links is an absolutely last resort and should not been done by those without knowledge and experience. It involves submitting a text document to Google Search Console that lists the backlinks you want to disavow. Google will then decide what action it wants to take, and if disavowed, you need to expect it will take time before your site rankings are affected.

For further information on link building, please read our articles:

Tags: seo

Posted: Friday 31 October 2025