Services · Link Building
The links that count are the ones somebody else decided to give you.
The one dependable way we know is to publish something people need to cite, and the links keep working after you stop paying.
The Mechanism
Google removed a sentence about links from its own documentation.
Start at the primary source. Google’s spam policies define link spam as “the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” Underneath sits the product catalogue of the link-building industry, word for word:
Examples of link spam from Google’s spam policy, quoted verbatim
- “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links”
- “Exchanging goods or services for links”
- “Excessive link exchanges”
- “Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites”
- “Low-quality directory or bookmark site links”
- “Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites”
Source: Google Search Central, spam policies · last updated 2026-05-15
The same page says paid links are fine for advertising and sponsorship “as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value.” What the industry sells you is that version with the attribute taken off.
Then Google’s own wording changed, and the price of a link didn’t move. Up to March 2024 the link spam section opened by calling links important, and it doesn’t now.
Feb 2024 · Archived
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
Source: Wayback Machine capture, Feb 4, 2024 · Google Search Central spam policies
Aug 2026 · Live
The current page opens with the definition of link spam. The sentence about links being an important factor is gone.
Source: Google Search Central, spam policies · last updated 2026-05-15
That tells you about emphasis, not algorithmic weight, but it points the same way Google’s people point in public.
Gary Illyes, Google · April 2024
“We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
Enforcement went quiet over the same stretch, which is not the same as gone. December 2022’s link spam update trained SpamBrain to “detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.” Google’s 2022 webspam report put that at 50 times more link spam sites caught than the update before it. Every spam update from March 2024 through June 2026 has been generic, and our read is that Google stopped announcing link crackdowns because the detection now runs continuously. (Source: Google Search Status Dashboard, ranking update history, retrieved Aug 3, 2026)
There is an asymmetry in who carries the risk. Google’s spam report page, as of April 2026, says “Google may use your report to take manual action against violations.” It also says: “To comply with regulations, we must send the submission text to the site owner.” Paid links are named on the form, so a competitor files one and the domain on it is yours. Never the vendor’s. (Source: Google spam report page, last updated 2026-04-23)
So what actually earns a link?
Something a writer needs. Somebody sits down to write, wants a number or a chart, goes looking, and the most citable version happens to be yours. Journalists surveyed by Muck Rack in 2026 put original data or research fourth on what they value in a pitch (40%), behind beat relevance (70%) and source access (58%). So data off the writer’s beat earns you nothing.
None of that is clever, and it works because almost nothing else does. The Backlinko and BuzzSumo figure at the bottom of this page carries the count.
Two things change the arithmetic, and the first is decay: a majority of older links are dead. Ahrefs puts it at 66.5%.
The second is that a plain mention now appears to do some of the work a link used to. Semrush looked at 1,000 domains and found nofollow and follow backlinks correlating almost identically with mentions on AI platforms. SALT.agency, across 5,825 URLs on a travel-heavy sample, found backlink metrics correlating moderately with visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and only weakly with Google’s AI Overviews. Small studies, both, and we hold them as a hint.
Ahrefs ran the one test anybody has published. In 2021 they disavowed 3,476 links to three of their own posts for a month, and traffic fell 18% and 13.3% on two of the three, with partial recovery after the links came back.
Their conclusion, that links still matter, is probably right. It is also three pages, run by a company that sells a backlink index, and that is the whole public evidence.
Source: Ahrefs, 2021
Links still count. The weight is unknown, probably falling, and nobody outside Google can tell you the number.
Check Your Own Profile
Six things you can go verify in Search Console today.
Run these before you take any sales call, ours included, and one or two will change how you read the retainer in front of you.
01
Most of your referring domains link to everybody
A referring domain is another website that links to you, counted once however many links it sends. Sort the Links report by linking site and read the top 20. If it comes back directories, aggregators, “top 10 companies” listicles and press-release mirrors, that is what any business with a website collects. None of it was a decision somebody made about you.
02
Paid placements weren’t qualified
Pick a link the company paid for, a sponsored post or an advertorial or a “featured in,” and inspect it. No rel="sponsored" and no rel="nofollow" and it is the example printed in the policy, which is the most common thing we find.
03
Anchor text is too tidy
Anchor text is the words somebody used as the clickable part of a link. Real ones use the brand name, the bare URL, or a scrap of the sentence the writer was in the middle of. A neat cluster of exact-match commercial phrases is the pattern Google spells out: “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases.”
04
The vendor reports on scores Google says aren’t Google’s
Where the monthly report grades links against DR or DA thresholds, set Google’s line beside it: third-party “reputation” or “authority” scores “don’t correspond to any of Google’s own signals nor come from Google.” You are paying against a number Google does not have.
05
Nothing on the site is citable
Go hunting on your own site for a page that publishes a number nobody else holds: a price, a rate, a benchmark that falls out of how you operate. If there isn’t one, the site has never had a way of earning a link. That is where 94% of pages sit.
06
Earned links that have quietly died
Pull the lost-backlinks report for the last 24 months and read it. A good share of what has gone is redesigns and 404s on the linking page, and much of that comes back with one polite email.
In Practice
What a link profile looks like when the data comes first.
Sherpa was never a link-building engagement. The links came out the side of publishing route-level data: vehicle registration stats, the routes carriers run, and per-market pricing on every page.
Case Study · Sherpa Auto Transport
Route-level data on every page, and the links followed.
Nobody pitched a link menu and nobody bought a placement. We built pages carrying pricing and transit times nobody else in the category would publish, out of Sherpa’s own data, and writers began citing them. Everything below is a SEMrush estimate, because none of it is analytics actuals.
873
Referring domains
5.4K
Backlinks
39
Authority Score, up from 27–28
~9×
Organic traffic: ~8,500/mo (June 2024) → ~79,000/mo (June 2026)
This is the flywheel we keep pointing at. Good content earns links, links earn traffic, traffic earns reviews and margin, and margin buys more content.
Source: Sherpa Auto Transport case study · SEMrush estimates, U.S. database, pulled June 18, 2026
The Work
The work, phase by phase.
Timings are estimates, and the phase that decides whether this works is the second one.
01
Inventory & classification · 1–2 weeks
Pull the Search Console links alongside a third-party crawler’s referring domains, dedupe them, then classify every row by hand: earned, paid, directory, syndicated, self-owned, dead. Spreadsheet work start to finish, and usually uncomfortable, because of how few links were anybody’s decision.
02
Find the dataset · 2–6 weeks, the bottleneck
Nearly every company is already sitting on something nobody else publishes: pricing by route, seasonality, quote-to-close by market, operational records going back years. It is almost never in a state you could publish from, so most of this phase is cleaning and joining the data. Phase one at a franchise-marketplace client (Franzy, below) was exactly this, before a word of content existed.
03
Build the asset · 4–8 weeks
A study, an index, a calculator, or a set of pages carrying numbers nobody else has. The methodology ships next to it, because a writer won’t cite what they can’t source-check.
04
Outreach · ongoing, low-yield
The list gets built by hand out of people who have genuinely covered the topic, and the pitches stay short. Propel worked through 400,000+ pitches and put journalist response at 3.43% in Q1 2024, their highest on record, up from 2.99% across 485,000+ pitches in Q2 2023. Muck Rack’s 2026 survey has 43% of journalists saying relevant pitches are rare, and anybody promising a fixed number of links a month is buying or guessing.
Sources: Propel pitch analysis, Q1 2024 · Muck Rack State of Journalism, 2026
05
Maintenance & reclamation · quarterly, permanently
Check the lost links, fix the redirects, write to the sites that broke something in a redesign. Dull and cheap, and hour for hour it recovers more links than outreach does.
06
What doesn’t happen
No purchased placements, no link exchanges, no mass guest posting, no PBNs.
First citations normally trail publication by weeks, and what follows is a slope rather than a step. Nobody should quote you a date, us included.
The Decision
What each path looks like.
Path A · The Retainer
A monthly invoice and a monthly report.
- The report carries a link count and an average DR, and both climb every month. The pages those links live on have no readers. Open three and see.
- Nothing on your own site changed, so when the invoice stops the number stops with it.
- The exposure sits with you, not the vendor, because your domain is the one on Google’s spam report form, and since April 2026 a report may trigger manual action.
- Those links decay at the same rate everybody else’s do, so some of what you spent last year has already evaporated.
Path B · The Published Asset
Six to eight weeks of nothing to show anyone.
- The first deliverable is a cleaned dataset and a decision about what’s publishable.
- Then something goes live that a writer can cite, and the citations turn up on their own schedule, unevenly, a good few from places nobody ever pitched.
- The asset carries on earning after the spend stops, and it turns up in AI answers too, where the evidence so far suggests a mention counts whether or not the link passes credit.
- What it costs you is patience, plus the fact that some assets simply never land.
94%
of blog posts earn zero external links. Publishing on its own is not a link strategy, and being the exception has to be built on purpose.
Source: Backlinko with BuzzSumo · 912 million posts analyzed, 2019
Sourcing
Where these numbers come from.
Dec 2022
The last spam update Google announced that named links. Everything since has been generic.
Source: Google Search Status Dashboard, retrieved Aug 3, 2026
50×
More link spam sites caught by SpamBrain than in the link spam update before it.
66.5%
Of links pointing at 2,062,173 sampled sites since January 2013 are dead, or 74.5% if you count temporary errors.
38%
Of webpages that existed in 2013 were gone by October 2023, against 25% of all pages from 2013–2023.
Source: Pew Research Center, May 2024
Go Deeper
The case studies behind this page.
Work With A2
See whether you have a dataset worth publishing.
We’ll go through the link profile you have and the data you are sitting on, and tell you straight whether there is an asset in there worth building. No promised placements, no link counts, no dates.