When backlinks is worth the effort

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Backlinks is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

When it is worth it

A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How to decide

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

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
• A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.