Link building is the deliberate effort to earn backlinks from other websites. Done well, it combines making something people want to reference with outreach to the people who might reference it. Done badly, it means buying, trading, or manufacturing links, which Google's spam policies prohibit.
What Google allows and what it does not
Google's spam policies describe link spam as links intended mainly to manipulate rankings. That includes buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation, requiring links in contracts or terms of service, and large-scale guest posting or article campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text.
Paid placements are fine for advertising, as long as the link is qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" so it does not pass ranking credit. Asking for a link is also fine. The line is crossed when the link exists only because of payment or a trade and is presented as editorial.
Approaches that work for SaaS
B2B software companies have link opportunities many other businesses do not, because their product sits inside an ecosystem of partners, customers, and reviewers.
- Integration partners: ask for a link from their marketplace listing and from relevant help docs
- Review sites and product directories: claim and complete your profiles
- Original research: publish data from your product or a survey that writers will cite
- Free tools and templates: calculators, generators, and checklists earn links over time
- Digital PR: pitch journalists with genuine stories or data
- Broken link building and unlinked mentions: fix existing references that point nowhere or carry no link
Picking targets
Start from relevance. A good target site is one your buyers read or your partners run. Competitor link profiles show which sites already link to tools in your category, and Search Console shows who already links to you and might link to more pages.
Avoid sites whose main business is selling posts, sites that publish on every topic for anyone, and networks of sites that all link to each other. Google is specifically built to discount these.
Measuring it
Track new referring domains, which pages they link to, and whether those pages move for their target queries. Rankings respond slowly and depend on many factors, so judge link building over months rather than weeks, and keep a list of every link you earned and how, so you can tell which approaches actually produce results.
Example
An analytics startup publishes a benchmark
An illustrative product analytics company, Funnelry, aggregates anonymized onboarding data across its customers and publishes a yearly report on typical activation patterns by product category. The report includes clear methodology and downloadable charts.
The team sends it to newsletter writers and bloggers who cover product-led growth. Some cite it with a link; others mention it without one, which becomes the next outreach list. Every claim in the report comes from Funnelry's own data, so there is nothing to retract later.
Common mistakes
Paying for “do-follow” guest posts
Sites that sell guest posts with followed links are doing exactly what Google's link spam policy describes. Those links are likely to be ignored and can lead to a manual action.
Sending templated mass outreach
Generic emails to hundreds of unrelated sites rarely work and damage your reputation with the editors you most want to reach.
Building links to pages that do not deserve them
If the target page is thin or outdated, links will not save it. Fix the page first.
Questions
Asking for and earning links is not. Buying, trading, or automating links to manipulate rankings is. The method matters, not the fact that you asked.
It varies widely. Google has to crawl the linking page, and links are only one of many ranking signals. Plan in months, and expect uneven results.
Only ones that can show exactly how they earn links. If an agency sells a fixed number of links per month at a fixed price, it is likely buying placements.
