Link Building

Backlinks: how we qualify a placement before we pitch it

Relevance beats volume every time. Our qualification checklist.

21 May 20266 min readZaviFx editorial team

Link Building

Volume was never the metric

A hundred links from unrelated directories move nothing. One link from a publication your customers actually read moves rankings and sends referral traffic that converts. We would rather report four placements a month and name them than report forty and hide the list.

What we check, in order

Topical relevance to the page we are pointing at — not just the site, the page. Real organic traffic on the linking domain, verified in a third-party tool, because domain authority alone is trivially gamed. Editorial standards: does a human commission and edit, or does the site publish anything? Outbound link patterns, since a page linking to gambling, crypto and dentistry in the same paragraph is a link farm. And whether the link would exist if we were not paying for it.

Note: Working through this yourself? We publish the same checklists we use internally — no gated PDFs.

Anchor text and placement

In-content links inside relevant prose outperform author bios and footers by a wide margin. Anchors should read naturally — a mix of branded, partial-match and descriptive phrases. Exact-match anchors repeated across dozens of placements is the clearest footprint there is.

What we will not do

Private blog networks, link exchanges at scale, comment and forum spam, or anything requiring a disclosure we would be embarrassed to make. The short-term lift is not worth the recovery project.