Stop building links. Build a website worth linking to.

We first published a version of this in 2013, when the prevailing advice was still that you needed to be actively acquiring links, constantly, and that a business not building links was falling behind.

Our advice then was to stop worrying about links and build a website that gives people a genuinely good experience. It was slightly contrarian at the time. It has aged better than anything else we have written.

Why it works

Links, shares, citations and mentions are outcomes. They happen because something was worth referencing.

Chasing the outcome directly means acquiring links from places with no reason to link to you, which is precisely the pattern search engines have spent two decades learning to identify. Producing the cause instead means the links arrive on their own, from relevant places, at a natural pace, and nobody has to spend an afternoon emailing strangers.

It’s slower. It’s also the only version that survives an algorithm update.

What “quality” actually means

It’s a vague word and it gets used to avoid saying anything. Here’s a more concrete version. A page is worth linking to if it does at least one of these better than the alternatives:

Answers the question more completely. Not longer. More completely. Most content on the internet answers eighty per cent of a question and leaves the awkward twenty per cent, which is the part the reader actually needed.

Contains something nobody else has. Original data, real examples, actual numbers from real work, photographs of the thing rather than stock imagery. This is the hardest to produce and by far the most linkable.

Is clearer. A well-organised explanation of something genuinely complicated has enormous value, because most explanations of complicated things are written by people too close to the subject.

Is honest about the trade-offs. Content admitting when something isn’t the right answer is unusual enough to be memorable, and it builds more trust than any amount of confident assertion.

Is actually usable. A calculator, a checklist, a template. Tools get referenced repeatedly in a way articles don’t.

If a page does none of these, it’s unlikely anyone will ever link to it, and no amount of promotion changes that.

What has changed since 2013

One thing, and it makes this advice more relevant rather than less.

Producing adequate content is now nearly free. Anyone can generate a competent thousand words on any topic in about ninety seconds. Which means adequate content has no value at all, because the supply is effectively infinite.

What remains scarce is what a machine can’t produce: what you actually learned doing the work, the thing that went wrong on a real job, the number you measured yourself, the opinion you’ll defend, the photograph of your own work.

The advice hasn’t changed. The bar for clearing it has moved, and it has moved in the direction of things only a real practitioner has.

The test

Would anyone bookmark this? Would anyone send it to a colleague? Would you reference it yourself if a client asked?

If the honest answer is no, publishing it doesn’t help. It adds another page of average content to a site, dilutes the authority of the pages that are good, and occupies the time that could have produced one thing worth reading.

Publish less. Make it count.

Where this leaves link building

Not entirely irrelevant. Some deliberate promotion is worthwhile: telling the people who would genuinely care that something exists, being available as a source, contributing where your industry actually gathers.

But the sequence matters. Make the thing worth linking to first. Promotion of something mediocre is just a slower way of finding out it was mediocre.

What we measure

We judge our own work by the number of enquiries a client receives each month, not by rankings or traffic. It’s a harder number to move and it’s the only one that pays anybody’s wages.

If your website isn’t producing enquiries and you’d like to know why, get in touch.

We didn’t make this up

We’d been telling clients this for years before Google said it out loud, and it was a difficult argument to win at the time. Below is Matt Cutts, then the head of Google’s webspam team, on the misconceptions the SEO industry holds about itself.

It’s old. That’s rather the point. The advice has outlasted every tactic that was fashionable when he recorded it, and it applies at least as well now that AI answers are assembling responses from whatever the web considers trustworthy.