SEO glossary
Link building
Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to yours, in order to improve how search engines judge your pages.
The line Google draws is whether the link was given or acquired. Anything bought, exchanged, or placed by you at scale is a link scheme by its published policy — including paid guest posts, reciprocal link deals, and directory or forum links you added yourself. The sanction ranges from the links being ignored to a manual action.
What holds up is duller and slower: publishing something worth citing, being the source of original data, earning coverage, and getting listed where a listing is genuinely warranted. Digital PR is link building that survives an audit.
Judge a prospect by whether it has organic traffic, not by its authority score. A domain with a strong score and no visitors has a link profile and nothing else — and those are the sites that sell links.
Common question
- Is buying links worth the risk?
- Google's link spam systems are built to detect paid patterns, and the cost of being caught lands on the whole site. The links also stop working when you stop paying.
Check this on your own site
- Referring Domains
The domain-level roll-up, strongest sites first
- Backlinks
Every individual link, with anchor and quality signals
Definitions are the easy part
The free plan opens every tool with 500 credits and no card, so you can see these numbers on your own site rather than in an example.
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