What Google says
We read Google's pages on 9 October 2026. Google's starter guide says that other sites linking to you happens naturally over time. It names word of mouth as one of the most effective and lasting ways to promote a site. It also warns that overdoing promotion can harm your site.
In its ranking systems guide, Google says PageRank, which uses links, is one of its core ranking systems. The starter guide adds that PageRank is just one of many signals. See backlink.
What Google calls link spam
Google's spam policies call it link spam when links are made mainly to change search rankings. The examples include:
- Buying or selling links for ranking.
- Excessive link exchanges, such as link to me and I will link to you.
- Links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases spread on other sites.
- Using automated programs to create links.
Google says such sites may rank lower or may not appear at all, and that it can also take a manual action. Paid links are not a violation if they carry a rel attribute of nofollow or sponsored. Links posted by visitors, such as in comments, should carry ugc or nofollow.
A made-up example
A cloth trader in Surat is told by a seller that ₹50,000 will buy 100 links on other sites. Google lists buying links for ranking as link spam, so the trader says no.
Instead, the trader holds a free one-day workshop for local tailors and puts a useful guide to fabric care on the website. A local news site writes about the workshop. A trade group lists the guide for its members. Both pages link to the trader. The links came because there was something worth linking to.
Our advice on where to start
Google's pages do not give a step-by-step plan for link building, so these points are our advice, not Google rules.
- Make something people want to link to, such as a guide, a calculator or real local data you have collected yourself.
- Tell people who would care: customers, suppliers, trade bodies and local news.
- Check that your own site is easy to share and that important pages load.
- Go slowly. Treat each link as something a real person chose to give.
Common mistakes
- Buying links in bulk.
- Swapping links with every site that asks.
- Writing guest posts only to place a keyword link.
- Counting links and ignoring where they come from.
- Forgetting to mark paid or sponsored links with the right label.
Related terms
- Backlink: a link to your site from another site.
- Anchor text: the visible, clickable words of a link.
- Off-page SEO (search engine optimisation): work done away from your own site.
- Internal linking: links between pages of the same site.
- Technical SEO: the setup work that lets search engines read your site.
For more, read backlink building tactics for long-term SEO. If you want help with outreach, see our link building service.
Sources
- Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide (developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide), read 9 October 2026.
- Google Search Central, "Spam policies for Google web search" (developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies), last updated 28 August 2026, read 9 October 2026.
- Google Search Central, "A guide to Google Search ranking systems" (developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide), read 9 October 2026.
- Google Search Central, "Link best practices for Google" (developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable), read 9 October 2026.
