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The Power of Backlinks in Strengthening Nashville SEO Campaigns

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Backlinks strengthen a local SEO campaign in two ways: Google uses them as one measure of how well known a business is, and they bring visitors from sites your customers already read. Google’s local ranking help says prominence is “also based on info like how many websites link to your business.” The power has a limit, though. Links bought or traded to influence rankings are link spam under Google’s rules, so the links that strengthen a campaign are the ones a business earns through real relationships and real news.

What counts, and what Google treats as spam

Google’s spam policies define link spam as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” The examples it lists include:

  • Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, including “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links,” exchanging goods or services for links, and sending someone a product in exchange for a post with a link.
  • Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) and partner pages “exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.”
  • Optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.
  • Low-quality directory or bookmark site links.
  • Links required by a contract “without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link.”

Paid links are not banned outright. Google says buying and selling links “is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes,” and that such links do not violate its policies as long as they carry a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute. Its guide to qualifying outbound links asks site owners to mark “advertisements or paid placements” with the sponsored value. A sponsorship can still be worth paying for, for the audience and the visibility; a properly marked sponsor link is simply not a ranking purchase.

Before spending time on a link opportunity, work out which kind it is:

  • Editorial links. A local news story, a trade publication article, or a blog post that links to you because it mentions your work. Nobody was paid, and the publisher chose the link.
  • Membership and listing links. A chamber of commerce member directory, a trade association listing, a supplier’s list of certified installers. These come with belonging to an organization. Some directories link to member websites and some do not, so check a current member’s listing before counting on one.
  • Sponsorship links. A sponsor page for an event, a team, or a nonprofit. If the organization marks the link as sponsored or nofollow, as Google asks, it brings visitors and recognition but is not meant to pass ranking credit.

All three can help a business, in different ways. Editorial links are the clearest case of another site choosing to mention you. Membership and sponsorship links are worth pursuing for the relationships and visitors they bring, on their own merits.

The local opportunities are organizations and publications your business has a genuine connection to:

  • Business organizations you belong to. The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, the chamber in a nearby county where you operate, or a trade association for your industry.
  • Local and trade news. A business opening, an expansion, a new service, a community project, or expert comment on an issue in your field are all reasons a reporter might mention you. A story that is genuinely newsworthy can earn a link; a press release written mainly to place links is the kind of thing the spam policy names.
  • Partners and suppliers. Manufacturers that list authorized dealers or certified installers, and businesses you genuinely work with, may list you. A partner page created only to swap links is the kind of thing Google calls an excessive exchange.
  • Community involvement. Events, nonprofits, and schools you support. Treat the link as a side benefit of support you would give anyway.
  • Useful material on your own site. A clear guide to a local permit process, a well-maintained resource for your trade, or original information others want to cite gives people a reason to link without being asked.

What to avoid

Some “local link building” offers match Google’s examples of link spam directly. Decline offers that sell a set number of links per month, guest posts with your keywords as anchor text, link swaps between businesses, and submissions to large numbers of low-quality directories.

Treat third-party authority scores with care as well. Domain Authority and Domain Rating are scores calculated by commercial SEO tools, not by Google. Google’s guidance on third-party SEO tools states that “third-party tools don’t have access to our internal ranking data.” A link from a site with a high tool score is not worth more to you because of the score; it is worth more if the site is relevant to your customers and links to you because it chose to.

If you find spammy links pointing at your site that you did not create, Google’s disavow help says that “in most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool.” It recommends disavowing only if you have “a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, AND the links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action.”

If Google does take manual action against your site, it appears in Search Console’s Manual actions report. The process is to fix the problem, removing the links where you can and disavowing those you cannot, then file a reconsideration request describing your fixes. Google notes that link-related reconsideration requests may take longer than usual to review.

Search Console’s Links report shows a sample of the links to your site, including the sites that link to you most and the pages they link to. Use it to confirm that links you expect have appeared, and to see which pages attract links on their own. Judge the effect of a link the way you would judge any change: note the date it went live, and look at visits from that site and at your search performance over the following months, without crediting a single link for every movement.

To start, list the organizations you already belong to, the partners who already know your work, and one piece of local news or useful material you could offer. Ask for the listings you are entitled to, tell your news to the people who cover your field, and leave link offers that come with a price and a quota unanswered.