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Why “average” backlinks don’t work

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There was a time…a very long time ago…when, as SEOs, we used to say that “a link is a link”. You would do anything and everything to get new links to websites regardless of what sites they were on. Things have changed quite a lot since then and as Google started getting better at understanding what are good and not-so-good links, the effort shifted to always focus on quality, relevant and helpful links.

This is why, at Artemis, we do all link-building in-house. That way we can control the quality and effectiveness of each link we build for clients. However, it is VERY time-consuming and one of the most challenging things we have to do, and that is why most SEO agencies actually outsource their link-building to link-building companies (I won’t name them here).

As our link quality standards are very high, we started wondering if perhaps they were too high, making it more difficult for ourselves than it should be. So, we decided to test the links built by one of these outsourced link-building agencies to see if their links actually have an impact on the rankings of a website. Our test website was one we built over a year ago for which we hadn’t done any prior link building. That way, we could see that if there were any changes in the rankings or search visibility of the website, it would be solely down to the links.

The links from the agency wouldn’t even meet our very minimum link quality standards and as expected…nothing happened. The links had no effect. We weren’t surprised. Quality links work; there’s no point in wasting money on low-quality links these days…a link is not always a link.

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