A How question

How does an SEO company build backlinks?

4 min read Cites 3 sources

An SEO company builds backlinks by giving other websites a reason to link to yours and making sure the people who run those sites find out about it. In practice that means four kinds of work: creating material worth citing, pitching stories and expertise to writers, contributing articles to relevant publications, and recovering links you are already owed. Each method has a version that Google’s spam policies treat as link spam, which they define as “the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” So the useful way to understand the work is to look at each method, what it should hand you, and where its line is.

Material other sites want to cite

The most straightforward reason for another site to link is something useful to cite: original data or research, a thorough guide, a calculator or template, a clear explanation of a hard topic. The company studies what writers in your field already cite, then builds something that fills a gap. You should receive the asset itself, which stays on your site whether or not it earns links, and a record of who it was shown to.

The line here is the purpose. Google’s spam policies list “creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating linking and ranking signals” as link spam. A page made only to collect links, with little value to a reader, falls on the wrong side.

Pitching writers and journalists

Digital PR means offering writers something they can use: new data, an expert comment, or a source for a story already in progress. When a writer uses it, the link comes from an editorial decision. What you receive is coverage, with links where the publication chose to include them, rather than a guaranteed list of sites.

Some of this work runs through services that connect journalists with sources. Those services change. One of them was retired, and Cision’s announcement about Connectively states: “As of December 9, 2024, the Connectively (HARO) platform has been permanently discontinued.” A proposal that still names it as a main channel was written from an old template.

Contributed articles

A contributed article is a piece written for another site in your field, published under your name or your company’s, with a link where it genuinely helps the reader. Done on a publication with real editorial standards, it is ordinary publishing.

Google draws its line at the anchor text. Its spam policies list “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites” among the examples of link spam, along with “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.” Ask to see the anchor text the company plans to use in contributed pieces. Anchors that repeat your target keywords across many articles are the pattern Google describes.

Two methods start from something that already exists. Unlinked mentions are places where your business is named on another site without a link; the company finds them and asks the site owner to add one. Broken link work finds links on relevant sites that point to pages that no longer exist, and offers a working page of yours on the same subject as a replacement. Both produce a short, checkable list: the page, the link added, and the date.

Paying for a link is not forbidden in itself. Google’s spam policies say it is “not a violation of our policies” to have paid links, as long as they are qualified with a nofollow or sponsored attribute, and its guidance on qualifying outbound links asks site owners to mark advertisements and paid placements with the sponsored value. What crosses the line is buying links for ranking purposes, without that marking.

So ask directly whether any placement in the plan involves payment, to the publisher or to anyone else, and if so, whether the link will be marked as sponsored. A company should be able to answer that for every link it reports.

Link work is easier to judge when it is planned with the content and the PR, not run as a separate line item. The plan should say which pages on your site need links, which assets are meant to earn them, and which stories or expertise will be pitched. A link program that cannot name the pages it is meant to support has no way to show it helped.

Ask for every link the company reports to be listed with five details: the page that links to you, the page on your site it points to, the anchor text, how it was earned (editorial coverage, contributed article, recovered mention, or paid placement), and the date. That list lets you check the work yourself, and it makes unmarked paid links and keyword-heavy anchors, the two patterns Google’s link spam examples single out, visible from the start.

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