Definition

Link building is the activity of obtaining links from other websites to a target site, typically through outreach, content promotion, partnerships or — when crossing policy lines — paid placements and exchanges.

Google's spam policies do not ban link acquisition outright, but they explicitly target link-building tactics that are designed to manipulate rankings. Listed examples include buying or selling links, excessive link exchanges, automated link generation, keyword-rich links embedded in widgets, and forum or comment spam. Link building that earns links through genuinely useful content, original research or legitimate digital PR is treated differently from link schemes, which can trigger ranking adjustments or manual actions.

Examples

• Digital PR earning citations

  A research firm publishes an original industry survey. Journalists cite the report in their articles and link back to the source page, producing inbound links acquired through editorial coverage.

• Unnatural link scheme

  A site participates in a private network where members exchange keyword-rich anchor links across unrelated sites. Google's spam policies classify this kind of link-building activity as a link scheme.

Sources

• Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google web search

Related terms

• Backlink
  A hyperlink on one website that points at another. Search engines treat backlinks as one signal of how the wider web vouches for a page.
• Link Spam
  Links created primarily to manipulate search rankings, which Google's spam policies treat as a violation that can affect a site's visibility.
• Natural Link
  A link given editorially by another site without solicitation, exchange or payment, contrasted with link schemes Google treats as spam.
• Paid Link
  A link created in exchange for money, goods or services, which Google requires to be qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".
• Sponsored Link
  A link marked with rel="sponsored" to indicate it was created as part of an advertisement, sponsorship, or other paid placement.
• Nofollow
  A link attribute (`rel="nofollow"`) telling search engines not to associate the source page with — or pass ranking credit to — the linked page.
• Link Equity
  An SEO-community term for the ranking value that one page can pass to another through a link, related to what Google originally called PageRank.
• Manual Action
  A penalty applied by a Google reviewer when a site is found to violate the search spam policies, demoting or removing affected pages from results.
• Disavow Links
  A Search Console tool that asks Google to ignore specific inbound links when assessing a site, intended for cases where unnatural links may cause harm.
• External Link
  An HTML link that points from one website to a different domain, also called an outbound link from the source site's perspective.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• Competitor Analysis
• SEO Audit