Links you earn, and links you already have but aren’t getting credit for
We don’t buy links, and we won’t sell you a monthly quota of them. What we do is recover the links you’ve already earned and lost, fix the linking inside your own site, and help you build something people cite without being asked. That’s slower, and it’s the part that still works.
What we actually do
Link reclamation
Finding external links pointing at URLs on your site that now 404, and redirecting them to the right page. Pure recovery of something you already paid for once.
Unlinked mention recovery
Places you’re named but not linked. A short, specific request to someone who already chose to write about you — the highest success rate in the whole discipline.
Internal linking at scale
Hub-and-spoke structure, orphan detection and anchor variation across hundreds of pages. Entirely within your control, and usually the fastest measurable win.
Assets worth citing
A free tool, a calculator, original data from your own operation. We build them, because we’re developers rather than outreach staff.
Link gap analysis
Who links to your competitors and not to you, and why. Often the answer is that they have something linkable and you don’t yet — which is a build problem, not an outreach problem.
Toxic profile review
When you’ve inherited links from a previous agency. Relevant mainly if there’s a manual action against the site — see penalty recovery.
Start with what you already earned
Before chasing a single new link, it’s worth checking how many you’re currently throwing away. On an established site, usually more than the client expects.
- Links pointing at dead URLs. Any redesign that didn’t build a redirect map leaves earned links pointing at a 404. The link still exists; the value goes nowhere. A redirect recovers it in minutes.
- Links to the wrong version of your domain. With and without www, http and https, trailing slashes — if those aren’t consolidated, your link equity is split across variants.
- Links lost in a platform migration. The most common cause we see, and the most recoverable if it’s caught in the first year.
- Mentions without a link. Someone wrote about you and didn’t link. Asking works, because they already decided you were worth writing about.
This half of the work has no risk attached and no outreach involved. It’s housekeeping that happens to be valuable, and it’s where we start every time.
What we won’t do
Worth being specific, because this is most of what’s sold under this heading:
- Buy links. Paying for links that pass ranking signals violates Google’s link spam policy. Paid placements have to be marked sponsored or nofollowed, at which point you’ve bought an ad, which is fine — just don’t let anyone call it SEO.
- Private blog networks. Sites that exist only to link. Detectable, and the whole network goes at once.
- Paid guest post networks. Large-scale placements with keyword-rich anchor text on sites that take anyone’s money.
- Directory and bookmark blasts. Hundreds of listings nobody reads. These stopped working over a decade ago.
- Reciprocal link schemes. “You link to us, we link to you”, at scale, is named explicitly in the policy.
- Trading a product for a link. Including our own plugins. Making a link a condition of getting something is a link scheme regardless of how it’s worded.
Google’s spam detection neutralises unnatural links rather than always penalising them — which means the usual outcome of a paid link campaign isn’t a penalty, it’s that you spent the money for nothing.
The only approach that compounds
Every link you buy has to be bought again. Something genuinely useful keeps earning links while you’re not working on it, and that difference is the whole argument.
In practice it’s one of four things, and three of them are build work rather than marketing:
- A free tool that solves one narrow problem properly — a calculator, a checker, a generator
- Original data from your own operation that nobody else can publish
- A reference page so complete that people link rather than re-explain
- Something free that’s usually paid in your industry
This is most of what we do on our own properties, so it isn’t theory. We build and run interactive tool suites across ten of our own sites, and they earn links and mentions without anyone doing outreach for them.
If that’s the direction, the work is web application development or plugin development with a content plan attached — not an outreach retainer.
Internal links are the half you control
Every external link is someone else’s decision. Every internal link is yours, and on most sites it’s badly under-used.
- Orphan pages. Published, in the sitemap, and linked from nowhere. Google treats them as unimportant, correctly.
- No hub structure. Supporting pages that don’t link up to the page you want ranking, so nothing accumulates.
- Identical anchor text everywhere. The same phrase on every link tells search engines less, not more.
- Deep pages buried. If it takes four clicks from the homepage, it’s being crawled accordingly.
On a site of a few hundred pages this isn’t hand work, so we built a plugin for it — YD Internal Linker suggests links from existing content, finds orphans and reports the structure. We use it across our own portfolio, and it’s available if you’d rather run it yourself.
Common questions
So do you sell link building or not?
We sell the half of it that’s defensible: reclamation, unlinked mentions, internal linking, link gap analysis, and building assets worth citing. We don’t sell link volume, and we won’t quote “30 links a month”, because the only way to deliver that number reliably is to pay for them.
Our last agency built us links. Are we at risk?
Possibly, and the first step is finding out which kind. Check Search Console for a manual action under Security & Manual Actions — if there’s nothing there, there’s usually nothing to clean up, because Google’s systems generally neutralise unnatural links rather than penalising the site. If there is one, that’s penalty recovery, and the disavow file matters.
How many links do we need?
Wrong question, and asking it is how people end up buying them. The useful question is why competitors are being linked to and you aren’t. Sometimes it’s age and reputation, which takes time. Often it’s that they published something linkable and you haven’t yet, which is fixable.
Will you do outreach for us?
Targeted outreach, yes — reclamation requests and unlinked mentions, where there’s a specific reason for the person to say yes. Cold mass outreach, no. We’re a development team, and the leverage we bring is building the thing worth linking to.
Is a nofollowed link worthless?
No. Google treats link attributes as hints rather than strict instructions, and a link from somewhere relevant sends you actual visitors regardless of its attribute. Judging a link only by whether it passes ranking signals is how people end up buying links on sites nobody reads.
How long does any of this take?
Reclamation and internal linking produce measurable change in weeks, because they fix existing problems. Earning new links is a matter of months and depends mainly on whether there’s something to link to. We’d rather say that now than in month three.
Find out what you’re already losing
The audit includes your broken inbound links and your orphan pages. That’s recoverable value sitting there now, before anyone talks about earning anything new.