Off-Page Optimisation

Why backlinks count, and which ones

For Google, a link from a third-party website is a recommendation. Many good recommendations from thematically fitting, trustworthy sites strengthen your position. A single link from a relevant specialist article delivers more than fifty entries in arbitrary web directories.

From this follows the most important rule in link building: quality beats quantity, and by a wide margin. Bought link packages, link exchange rings and automated directory entries are now reliably detected by search engines — at best they fizzle out, at worst you earn a penalty that then has to be laboriously worked off. That sort of link building you won't get from us.

First a look at the inventory — the backlink analysis

Before new links are built, we look at what's already there. Every grown website has a link profile, and not always a healthy one:

• Which pages link to you, with which link texts and to which destination pages?
• Are there toxic links from spam networks or old link-buying sins that should be disavowed?
• Where does the competition get its links, and which of those sources would be reachable for you too?
• Do valuable old links point into the void because URLs changed? We reclaim such links via redirects

The last point in particular is often overlooked. After a relaunch, external links tend to point at pages that no longer exist — squandered ranking value that a few clean redirects can bring back.

How we approach link building

Sustainable backlinks emerge when there's a genuine reason to link to you. That's what we work on, along several routes:

• Linkable content: specialist articles, guides and data others gladly cite as a source. Our knowledge section and glossary work exactly this way on our own site
• Our own tools as link magnets: a free tool like our SiteSentry collects links you'd otherwise have to knock on doors for
• Targeted outreach instead of mass mails: a few, hand-picked requests to thematically fitting sites, associations and portals
• Entries with substance: industry directories and portals that actually get visited — consistently maintained, also as a signal for local SEO
• Tracking down unlinked mentions: whoever writes about you without linking is usually just one friendly enquiry away from the link

One thing we deliberately don't promise: a fixed number of links per month. Whoever sells it that way ends up delivering bulk from dubious sources. Link building with us is craftwork with the whole profile in view.

Related topics

On-page optimisation

The best links are of little use if the destination page doesn't convince in content. More on on-page optimisation.

SEO audit

The backlink analysis is a fixed part of our audit. More on the SEO audit.