Backlink Building & Management

Make Sure You Know Who Has Linked To Your Website - backlink management tools can help avert serious Google penalty issues.

There's a lot of confusion about linking from one website to another, known as backlinking - Is it good, is it bad or doesn't it matter anymore?

If it's done properly, it's good. 

If it's done badly, artificially, simply to cheat Google and other search engines into thinking that a webpage is more important or more popular than it actually is, then it's bad. Yes, there used to be a time when you could simply buy links to your website and watch it climb the rankings - you can't anymore, so don't do it.

If you, or a client perhaps, has been a victim of backlinks which have been penalised by Google then it may be necessary to try and remove those links and to disavow them using Google's Disavow tool from within the Google Search Console. If you're not sure how to do this there are many tools available that will help you to identify the offending links and build the disavow file.

There are, in fact, many products and services available to help you to manage your website's backlinks and keep in Google's good books - here's our directory of Backlink Building & Backlink Management Products.

Update: November 2016

Google have announced that there will not be staged updates anymore for Penguin - instead it is to be a real-time process. Whereas before, if your site was penalised by Google for suspect backlinks, you may have had to wait for months for your ranking to be restored even after taking corrective action. Now the offending link will be effectively ignored and no site-wide penalties will be applied.

Site owners should still be cautious however, Google could still apply manual penalties, "manual actions" as they are called, if they considered it necessary so check your Google Search Console regularly.