Getting other websites to link to yours

Why a link from somebody else counts for more

You can write anything you like on your own website, and search engines know it. What they cannot discount so easily is somebody else choosing to point at you. It is the same logic as reviews: the claims you make about yourself are the cheap half, and the part that decides whether anyone believes them comes from other people.

Three different things get called “backlinks”

This is where most advice falls apart, because these behave nothing alike and lumping them together is how people end up disappointed.

• Links that pass credit. An ordinary link from a real site that chose to mention you. These are the ones that move rankings, and they are the hardest to get.
• Citations. Being listed — name, address, phone number — on directories and registers. The link itself may pass nothing. What matters is that the details match everywhere, because that is how a search engine reconciles that all these mentions are the same business.
• Profiles you control. LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and the rest. Almost all of them mark their outbound links so no ranking credit passes at all. They are still worth having, for reasons that have nothing to do with links.

Anyone selling you “200 backlinks” is selling the third kind, or the fourth kind that does damage. Nobody sells the first kind, because it cannot be sold.

Start with what you already qualify for

This is the part almost everybody skips, and it is free. Most businesses are already entitled to several listings they have simply never claimed.

• Your registration body. If you are a registered electrical contractor with Safe Electric, you are in a register people actually search. That is a listing you earned by being qualified, it cannot be bought, and a competitor cannot copy it. Every trade has an equivalent — check yours is current and that the details on it are right.
• The established directories. Golden Pages and its equivalents are worth being on and worth being on correctly. One wrong phone number from 2019 sitting on a directory is actively unhelpful, because it is a contradiction a search engine has to resolve.
• Suppliers and manufacturers. If you are an approved installer, a stockist, or a certified fitter for somebody’s product, they very often have a “find an installer” page. These are genuinely good links and you usually get them by sending one email to your rep.
• Anything you already sponsor. The under-twelves kit, the club programme, the school fundraiser. You paid for it. Ask for the link.
• Local bodies. Chambers of commerce, business associations, the Local Enterprise Office. Membership usually comes with a listing nobody ever fills in.

Work through that list properly and most businesses find five or six they were entitled to and never took. That is a better afternoon than anything you could pay an agency for.

What the platforms are actually for

LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, a podcast on Spotify. None of these will move your rankings through the link, and anyone telling you otherwise is either mistaken or selling. They earn their place for three other reasons.

• They rank for your own name. Somebody who has been given your name by a neighbour will search it. What they find should be you, several times over, rather than a competitor advert and a dormant page from 2018.
• They confirm you exist. Consistent details across several platforms is the same signal as a consistent directory listing, and it is read the same way.
• They get quoted. AI assistants answering questions about a business draw on whatever they can find about it. A YouTube video showing the actual work, or a podcast episode where you explain something properly, is material that exists nowhere else.

Pick the ones you will actually maintain. Two live profiles beat six abandoned ones, and an abandoned profile is worse than no profile because it answers the question “are these people still going?” with a no.

What does damage

• Buying links. Against every search engine’s guidelines, detectable, and the penalty lands on you rather than on whoever sold them.
• Directory blasts. Five hundred submissions to directories nobody has ever visited, usually with slightly different details each time — which actively undoes the consistency you were trying to build.
• Reciprocal schemes. “Link to me and I’ll link to you” at any scale is a pattern, and patterns are what get found.
• Guest posts on sites that exist to sell guest posts. If the site has no readers, the link has no value and the association does you no favours.

Where we are with this ourselves

Worth saying plainly, since this page is asking you to trust us on it: our own newest sites have almost none of the above yet, and they are not ranking. Both are a few weeks old, neither has the local signals these results are decided on, and we have written that down in our own records rather than quietly not mentioning it.

That is the honest shape of this work. It is the slowest of the three things that decide whether you get found, it cannot be rushed without doing harm, and a new business does not get to skip it. What it can do is claim everything it is already entitled to, which is usually more than it thinks.

The honest summary

Do the free, earned ones first — your register, your suppliers, the things you already sponsor, the bodies you already pay to belong to. Get your name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Keep two platforms alive rather than six dormant. Then stop thinking about links and go back to writing something worth linking to, because in the long run that is the only thing that generates the first kind.