The practice of deliberately acquiring backlinks to a website to grow its authority and rankings.
ID
SS-DF-127
Confidence
High · 87
Evidence
Strong
Updated
2026-07-08
Definition
The practice of deliberately acquiring backlinks to a website to grow its authority and rankings.
Link building is the set of activities used to earn or attract inbound links, ranging from digital PR and original research to guest contributions, resource-page outreach and partnerships. Sustainable link building prioritises relevance, editorial merit and trust over volume, because low-quality or paid links carry penalty risk. The goal is to earn links a rational editor would give freely, which is also what search engines are increasingly able to detect and reward.