Links still matter. Google says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. What has changed is which links are worth having, which ones put a site at risk, and the fact that being mentioned and cited now matters in AI answers too. This guide covers what Google treats as link spam, the approaches that still earn links honestly, how links relate to AI search, and how to measure the work without chasing vanity metrics.
What Google treats as link spam
Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate rankings. Its examples include:
- Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, including paying with money, goods or services, or sending a product in exchange for a post with a link.
- Excessive link exchanges and partner pages that exist only for cross-linking.
- Using automated programs or services to create links.
- Advertorials whose links pass ranking credit, and links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites.
- Low-quality directory or bookmark site links, links in widgets, and links spread across the footers or templates of many sites.
- Forum comments with optimised links in the post or signature.
- Creating low-value content mainly to manipulate linking and ranking signals.
Paid links are not banned as such. Google says buying and selling links for advertising and sponsorship is a normal part of the web, as long as the links are qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". User-generated links, such as comments, should carry rel="ugc".
What still earns links
Everything below has one thing in common: someone links because the link helps their own readers. That is also what keeps it on the right side of the policies above.
Original research and data
Journalists, bloggers and industry sites link to sources. If you publish data nobody else has, such as a survey of your customers, an analysis of your own product data, or a study of a public dataset, you give them something to cite. It works best when the finding is specific and new; a study that confirms what everyone already assumed gives nobody a reason to write about it. Publish the method with the results, so others can trust and quote them.
Useful resources and free tools
Calculators, templates, checklists, glossaries and free tools attract links for years because people reference them when they explain a topic. The test is simple: would someone in your field bookmark it and send it to a colleague?
Expert commentary
Reporters writing about your field need quotes and explanations. Answering their requests quickly, with something specific and quotable, earns mentions and often links from news and trade sites. Only answer where you have real expertise; generic answers are ignored.
Unlinked mentions
When a site mentions your brand, product or research without linking, a short, polite note asking for a link is reasonable, because the writer already chose to mention you. To find mentions, use Google Alerts or a media monitoring tool. Search Console will not help here: its Links report shows a sample of links Google knows about, not mentions without a link.
Broken link replacement
Pages that link to resources that no longer exist leave their readers at a dead end. If you have a genuinely equivalent or better resource, telling the site owner about the broken link and suggesting yours solves a real problem for them. Suggest it only where it fits; a mismatched replacement is just another pitch.
Real relationships
Partners, suppliers, integrations, customers and events you sponsor often link naturally: a “works with” page, a case study, an event listing. These are legitimate when they reflect a real relationship. They become a problem when they turn into link exchanges for their own sake, or when sponsorship links are not marked as sponsored.
Tip: the content that earns links on its own is also the content that answers questions best. Before any outreach, ask whether the page you want links to is genuinely the best resource on its topic. If it is not, improve it first.
How to ask for a link without spamming
Outreach is where most link building goes wrong. A few rules keep it useful for the person receiving it:
- Write to a person about their page. Name the article, say what you noticed, and why it matters to their readers. If the email could be sent to anyone, do not send it.
- Offer something they can use: a fix for a broken link, a data point they can cite, a correction, a better source. Not “we’d love a backlink”.
- Keep it short and make the request clear in one or two sentences.
- Never offer payment, products or a link back in exchange. Those turn an editorial link into exactly what Google’s spam policies describe.
- Do not dictate anchor text. Let the site describe your page in its own words.
- Follow up once at most, and accept silence as an answer.
- Respect privacy rules for cold email in your country and theirs; in the EU that includes data protection law.
What to stop doing
- Buying links that pass ranking credit, whatever the seller calls them.
- Guest posts written for the link, especially with keyword-rich anchor text, on sites that publish anything for anyone.
- Press release distribution for links. Distribute releases for publicity if you like, but optimised anchor links in them are named in Google’s link spam examples.
- Link exchanges beyond genuine, occasional editorial relationships.
- Directory and bookmark submissions on low-quality sites, and footer or widget links spread across other people’s sites.
- Networks of sites built to link to each other. Creating low-value content to manipulate linking is itself on Google’s list.
Links and AI search
AI answers add a second reason to be mentioned on trusted sites. Google says pages shown as supporting links in AI Overviews and AI Mode must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, with no special optimisation beyond normal SEO, so the same work that makes a page rank makes it eligible. Other AI assistants also cite web pages and name brands in their answers, and those mentions are now tracked by AI visibility tools.
No search engine publishes how much links influence AI citations, so treat any precise claim with caution. The practical overlap is clear, though: original research, expert commentary and useful resources earn links, mentions and citations at the same time. Our comparison of AI visibility tools covers how to track the mentions side.
Fix your own site first
Links to a page that returns an error, redirects through a chain or is blocked from indexing are wasted. Before spending time on outreach:
- Make sure pages that already have links return 200 or redirect in one hop to the right page. See content pruning for handling removed pages.
- Link from the pages that earn links to the pages you want to rank. See internal linking architecture.
- Run a technical check of the pages you will promote, using the technical SEO audit checklist.
Measuring the work
- New referring domains that are relevant to your field, from your link tool, rather than the raw number of links.
- Search Console’s Links report for the top linking sites, the most linked pages and the most common link text, from Google’s own sample.
- Referral traffic and key events in GA4 from the sites that linked, the clearest sign that a link is worth something on its own.
- Clicks, impressions and rankings of the linked pages in Search Console, compared over time.
Third-party authority scores are useful for comparing sites quickly, but they are each vendor’s estimate, not a metric Google uses, so do not make one the goal. And expect the effect to be gradual: there is no fixed timeline from a new link to a ranking change.
Do you need to disavow links?
Usually not. Google says that in most cases it can assess which links to trust without help, so most sites will not need the disavow tool. It calls disavow an advanced feature to use with caution, and only when you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links and they have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. Disavowing good links by mistake can do more harm than the spam ever did.