Link building: coverage you could show a journalist, not links you would hide

It is against the published search spam policies, which describe exchanging money, goods or services for links intended to pass ranking signals as link spam. That is a policy position, not an opinion, and it applies whether the link is bought directly or through an intermediary who does not tell you.

The practical risk is less often a dramatic penalty and more often quiet devaluation: you pay for fifty links, they pass nothing, and you never find out. The worse outcome is a manual action, which is rarer but costly and slow to recover from. Either way you have paid for something that did not work.

Digital PR earns coverage by giving publications something worth publishing: original data, expert commentary, a newsworthy story. Links follow because a journalist chose to include one. Link building, as usually sold, works backwards from a link target and finds a way to place it.

The distinction that matters is who decides. If an editor decided, it is a citation. If you or a paid intermediary decided, it is a placement, whatever it is called on the invoice.

It depends entirely on whether the publication would run the article if it contained no link. Writing for a publication whose audience you can serve is normal professional activity and always has been.

What the spam policies specifically describe is large-scale article campaigns written mainly for the links inside them, published on sites that accept anything. A site with a page listing its guest post prices is that, regardless of how it describes itself.

Usually not. Search engines have become considerably better at ignoring low-quality links rather than penalising sites for them, and a disavow file applied carelessly can remove links that were doing you good.

The exception is a manual action naming unnatural links, where a disavow is part of the recovery. Outside that, the budget almost always produces more by earning good coverage than by trying to remove bad coverage.

Almost every business we have heard described as boring is sitting on data or expertise a journalist would want. You know what your prices have done over three years, what your customers get wrong most often, what is changing in your supply chain, what a regulation means in practice for people who have to comply with it.

The story rarely comes from the company. It comes from what the company knows. That reframing is most of the work in the first month.

We do not commit to a number, and providers who do are usually meeting it with placements rather than coverage. Earned coverage depends on what else is happening in the news that week and on whether an editor finds the story useful, and neither is under our control.

What we do commit to is the work: the assets built, the outlets approached, the commentary submitted, and a full disclosure of every link that results and where it came from.