Hi, Sad Dawson here. Now link building has always been and continues to be a crucial part of the SEO Jigsaw that you need to build authority and drive rankings in Google. And with the emergence of AI-based search like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, the importance of links in getting your site cited in responses means that link building becomes of even greater importance. So I've grouped together all the best episodes of the podcast that touch on link building into a series dedicated to all the many strategies and tactics you can use to get more links to your content. So let's get on to the podcast. Hello and welcome to SEO Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordsPeopleUse.com, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO, developer, affiliate marketer, and entrepreneur. I've been building the monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, this is episode 92 of SEO is not that hard. And today I just wanted to talk about the difference really between building versus buying backlinks. Now see when a lot of people talk about building backlinks, um some people just consider that to be going out and paying for backlinks, buying backlinks off people who are selling backlinks on their sites, or um selling backlink inserts on content they've already got, creating new content to put those backlinks in and you pay them for it. Now this is not what Google likes. This is the kind of link manipulation that Google's considered to be spammy. And it's pretty because there's no actual merit to whether you deserve a link or not, it's just whether you've got the cash or not determines whether you get a link. You've got the cash, you get a link. You haven't got the cash, you don't get a link. So the link sellers do not care who they're linking to as long as your money is good. Now the reason Google doesn't like this is because it if you go back to the original page rank algorithm, which um Google um based a lot of their original success uh around was the fact that they discovered they could classify the popularity and the um how good a page was by and how relevant a page was by seeing how many people link to it. They consider these links as votes. So people um who are linking without being asked to link or without being enticed to link, without being paid, without being transactional, um, those links are genuinely genuine. You know, people will only tend to link to something that they think is good if there's no other reason for doing it. You know, if they're just trying to find a resource that's useful for their audience, or just a resource they find useful, or a resource they want to say to people, look, this is really good over here, come and look at this. Then that's great. And it is worked really well. And if you go back to, like, say, the early 2000s, late 90s, when basically the older first generation search engines, like the alter fisters and and such engines like that, where basically if you just span the keyword on a page, they just look for the number of on a basic level looked at how many times a keyword was mentioned on a page, the one which mentions it the most times would get to the top, which obviously people soon gamed because you just the keywords stuff the keyword in and you'll rank, which meant you know that the quality of the pages was soon dissipated to being absolute rubbish. And also, it wasn't necessarily the best way of finding something. The best article on something might not mention the keyword anywhere near as many times as as another article, but it could be a better article. And Google discovered that if you just looked at how many pages were linking to individual pages and what the anchor text of those pages were, they could get a really a much better, clearer idea and create a much better index and produce surface much better results, basically. But obviously, then as soon as people twigged onto this, SEOs were like, right, well, we can just buy links. We don't have to we don't have to wait for people to link to us anymore, we can just buy links. And that will propel our um web pages and our clients' web pages up the rankings for the terms that we want. And that was all very well and good, and it worked, and you know, I think for a good few years it worked fine, and I think at many times Google didn't I can't remember when they've made it against their terms of service for a good long time, it basically was not risky. And um people just did it willy-nilly. Got to a point though where it started to negatively affect lots of um niches, and this is where as soon as the Google results started looking spammy because people were just spammed the link graph, this is when Google started to take action, and this is when the whole um buying back links um became against a terms of service, and then we follow it down the route to Penguin, where they eventually got to the point of really heavily penalising people who were obviously buying links because some of some of the links that people were buying back then were just so obvious that they were bought that it became easy for Google to penalise you for them. So, yeah, so that's the reason Google don't like buying links, because it essentially pollutes the link graph and makes um the research engine results spammy. So, is building backlinks as opposed to buying backlinks, is that also against terms of service? Well, let's think about it, okay. So if you're trying to build backlinks without paying for backlinks and without there being any kind of remuneration, not like giving away something, because if essentially paid backlinks, it's not just be cash, it could be if you give away a product um to somebody, and as part of giving away that product is you expect them to link to you. That is transactional, it is a kind of link buying. So if we take a step back from that and say, right, we're not gonna pay anyone for links, we're not gonna make it transactional, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna go out there and essentially ask people for links or bring ourselves to their attention in the hope that they will link to us. Now, I think it's uh perfectly okay to make an request for a link as long as that request is um not doesn't have to be met, there's no coercion for someone to make that that request, and that you also don't make any specification really on how they link to you. So you might not request what pays they're linked to and what anchor text they're linked to. You essentially are in this this situation where you're you're it's a type of public relations really, and it's quite normal for any company or any organisation, uh any pressure group, anyone to go out there and make a noise about something they care about. And if you're doing it in a way where what you really want is links, but you don't specifically ask for them, then that's perfectly fine. It's perfectly normal to go out there into the world and say to people, hey, look at us, look what we can do. Um and especially if you tie it up around a story or a narrative that might interest the person you're talking to. And that's how a lot of digital PR works. These digital PR companies they will go out, they will construct a story around your product or service or your website, they'll build a narrative, and then they'll then essentially try to um sell that narrative in to um their journalists or any other uh website that might potentially link to you. And here the key thing is then you're selling into them, you're not buying from them, you're not buying a link from them, really you're trying to sell in to these people, and you're what you're selling is free, you know, you're just trying to sell a story to them, and hopefully they'll pick that story up, run with it, which will good for them, because they get a story that they can run. But it also hopefully if they link back to you, then that's positive for your link bill. So this is a completely legitimate way of doing it, as long as, again, not transactional, no money's no money or services change hand. And you know, I've seen the John Mueller and other people at Google say this is a completely fine and normal thing to do. Because you're not trying to have any kind of editorial control over what the third-party website says or does. Whether it does or doesn't link to you, use what anchor text it does or doesn't use, whether it even links to you at all, whether it runs your story, you have you are not trying to exert any control. So that kind of link building method is completely legitimate. No problem at all with that. Completely white hat, you're not going to get any issues with that. I have seen some people say, but surely if I pay a company to do link building for me, to do digital PR for me, am I not buying links? Because I'm spending money to pay someone to try and build links for me. Well, this is really just very similar to having a web developer build your website for you. If you're paying a web developer or a graphic designer or anybody to do any kind of service in building your website, you know, you're paying them for their time to do the job. Now, if you're paying someone to do link building for you and they are using um PR techniques and you know link requests but not link payments, then that's fine. They're just doing a job for you. You're not paying for the links, you're paying for their time. And as long as their time and the number of links are decoupled, then that's perfectly fine. You know, um, you know, if you're doing that as a service, it's just a normal, it's just a completely normal thing to do, it is not against terms of service. So don't let people tell you that. You've got to be careful though that obviously that whoever you're employing is actually following you know a legitimate tech white hat technique. So if they're saying they're doing digital PR, then I would be wary of someone that says, Oh yeah, uh we'll do digital PR and we will get you 500 links, and they deliver exactly 500 links, and then you look at it and it's like they haven't actually done PR, they're just told you they're doing PR, and then they've gone and bought links, and they're trying to fob you off. And that obviously is dangerous, and you've got to watch out for that because Google will come back and penalise you whether you knew they were doing that or not. You know, it's buyer beware, it really is buyer beware. But there's plenty of companies out there that do legitimate link building using digital PR and other methods similar to that, and you know, just I think the thing to be wary of, I will be more wary of if someone was doing something when they guaranteed me a certain number of links, or it was an exactly exact specific number of links they were going to provide. I would potentially expect them to talk about a range of links that you might get, and I would expect them to talk about how they're their process of how they're gonna build a story and how they're gonna um then promote that story, and you know, might talk about all the successes they've had, and that's fine, but I think if it comes down to an exact number of links they're gonna build, and then when you look at them, it looks like link buying, it doesn't look like genuine editorial uh and editorial produced links, then that's when that I'll be raising red flags and checking is that are they doing and providing what they said they were gonna do. Now, link building doesn't have to be digital PR, it doesn't have to be um employing a company to do it for you. I mean, I'll give you an example of what we did with Kiwis People Use when we launched. Um now, obviously we're starting from scratch and we didn't want to buy any links because I as I've talked before about getting penalised by Penguin in the past on Brubonnet Cody K and how I have not done any link building since 2012 time because to me it's just too much of a risk I build for the long term. Um so what I did with that was literally went out on Twitter and just started talking about the tools we've launched, how what keywords people use was back in the first day when it was sort of our minimal viable product. I went and said to people and made a noise on Twitter, look, we've done this thing, found other people talking about people also asked and said, Hey, this is our tool that we've built, look at this. And you know, just talk to people I knew in the industry and said, Hey, have a look at this, and then hoped that some of them might retweet it or whatever and go go forward with that. And we did start to pick up a lot of links very quickly just because we went out and made a bit of noise. It was very basic digital PR. It was just me on Twitter, but that's the kind of thing you need to do. You just need to get the ball rolling. And if you've got good enough content, good enough tool, good enough product, then it will start to um you know, like a rolling stone, it will hit like an avalanche or a snowball going down a hill is the what I'm trying to think of. You will start to pick up links more and more naturally. The more people link to you, then the more people see you written about, then more people will then in time start to write about you and link to you as well. And that's how it happens. So it's a very basic digital PI would do for that. And that is the kind of link building that I'll do. Because everyone is genuinely linking to you because they think you've got something that's worth sharing. And you just have to get that ball rolling by going out there and making a bit of noise. But yeah, so that's building, which is very different from buying. Buying, I would not suggest people do. Building, if that includes paying people to build for you, as long as they're not buying, then that's all good and nothing to worry about. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleuse.com slash demo, where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleuse.com slash demo, and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener, I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share, it really helps. SGO is not that hard, it's brought to you by Keywordspeopleuse.com, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day, try it today for free at KeywordspeopleUse.com. To get an instant hit of more STO tips, then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick STO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter, or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuse.com. Bye for now, and see you in the next episode of STO is not that hard.