A short guide to backlinks

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Everything we would tell a client about backlinks in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What is actually at stake

A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The practical version

Bought links are a risk that eventually gets priced in. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Where it usually goes wrong

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about backlinks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Bought links are a risk that eventually gets priced in — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.