Every week somebody lands in your inbox offering a hundred links for ninety euros, and every week somebody buys them. The sensible way to get backlinks for your website is slower, cheaper and sold by nobody: the links that work come out of things your business already does, not out of a shopping cart.
What a backlink is and why Google pays attention
An inbound link —a backlink, in the trade— is simply another page putting your address inside its text and letting people click it. That is all. The thing is that Google has been reading those links as recommendations from the very beginning: if half the county mentions you, you must be doing something right.
That still holds, with two caveats worth keeping in mind. First, who links to you now matters far more than how many do. Second, links do not fix a site that is not indexed or a page that answers nothing; that comes first, and we cover it in why your website does not show up on Google.
The difference between a link that helps and one that just sits there
Look at how you link when you write something and you already know the answer: you link to places you know, that are relevant to the point, and that help whoever is reading. Google is trying to recognise exactly that.
Three signs of a link that helps
- The page genuinely exists. It gets traffic, somebody keeps it updated, and it is not a warehouse of articles written to place links.
- It has something to do with you. One link from the electricians' trade association is worth more than twenty from a recipe blog.
- It sits inside text that justifies it. In the middle of a paragraph about the subject, not in a footer with forty links in a row.
Those three yardsticks rule out 90 % of what gets sold out there.
The links you already have and never claimed
Before going out to find anything, half an hour of review usually beats a month of emails. Almost every business has links that were forgotten or point to the wrong place:
- Your Google listing, which has a website field and sometimes points at the home page when it should point at the service. We go through it in the Google Business Profile guide.
- Your social profiles: the Instagram bio, the LinkedIn page, the Facebook profile. They do not move rankings on their own, but they bring people.
- Your suppliers' websites, which often run a dealer or approved-installer finder where you are listed without a link.
- The trade body or association you already pay dues to, which lists you with a phone number and no web address.
- Places that already mention you by name, in a news piece or a listing, but without linking. Asking for it is a three-line email.
That last one pays best of all. If somebody has already named you, you are not asking a favour: you are making it easier for their reader to find you.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Where a local business finds its links
A local business does not need to invent anything. The links are where the business already is: in the life of the town, in the trade, and along the supply chain.
Trade bodies, associations and shopkeepers' groups
Almost all of them run a member directory. Plenty of those directories are out of date. An email asking them to add your web address next to the phone number gets answered in two days and leaves you a relevant, stable link, which is exactly the hard kind to come by.
Suppliers, brands and distributors
If you work with a brand that runs a stockist or service-centre finder, there is a link waiting there. And if you have been on a training course or hold a certification, there is usually a list of certified businesses you can ask to join. These are among the best links a small business can have: they come from serious sites in your own trade.
Local press, listings and town guides
The county paper, the council's events listings, the town-centre shopping guide. You do not need to pay for advertising: you need something to tell them, which can be a refit, an anniversary, a new hire, or working with a local organisation.
Sponsorships that give you a link, and the ones that do not
Sponsoring the local team is a fine thing for many reasons, but for this it only counts if the club has a website and puts you on it with a link. Google does not read the banner by the pitch.
When you agree the sponsorship, put it in writing: business name, link to the service page you care about and, if money changed hands, a request to mark it as sponsored. That last part is not fussiness: Google asks for paid links to be marked with rel="sponsored", and following that keeps both of you out of trouble.
Directories: which are worth it and which are noise
General directories where anyone signs up in thirty seconds move nothing. The ones worth the trouble are few and easy to spot: there are people behind them, they vet who gets in, and real humans use them.
- Your trade body or professional register.
- The shopkeepers' association for your street or neighbourhood.
- Official brand finders for the products you work with.
- Local guides run by the council or the county authority.
One rule never fails: if a directory charges you to appear and sends you no visits at all, it is not a directory, it is an invoice.
«Nofollow» does not mean worthless
You will hear that a link «is no good» because it carries the nofollow attribute. That attribute tells Google not to pass authority through it, and it is used on comments, forums, social networks and paid links. Google also has sponsored, for anything paid, and ugc, for what users write.
Not passing authority is not the same as being useless. People come through those links, and a link profile made up exclusively of «good» links looks like exactly what it is: manufactured.
The link text matters more than people think
The words you click on —the anchor— tell Google what the destination page is about. The natural pattern is a varied one: sometimes the business name, sometimes the full address, sometimes a phrase along the lines of «shutter repairs in Palamós».
What gives the game away is twenty different sites linking to you with the exact same commercial phrase. If you are going to ask for a link, suggest wording that fits inside the other person's sentence, not the phrase you would love to rank for. How those phrases get chosen is in how to choose your keywords.
Content that earns links on its own
The dullest and most effective way to get links is to publish something other people find worth citing. No market research required: in a small business, your own figures and specific guides do the job.
- Real local prices, even as ranges.
- A calendar of what has to be done when in your trade.
- A plain-English explanation of a regulation that affects your customers.
- Your own photos of finished work, which nobody else has.
What to publish and how often is in whether a business blog is worth it.
What they will try to sell you by email
The email always arrives the same way: a name you do not know, «I came across your site and think I can help», and a package of «high authority» links at a price that looks good. Sometimes they even attach a list full of very technical-sounding metrics.
What to reply when somebody offers «high authority links»
Ask three things before anything else: the exact addresses of the pages the link would sit on, how many people visit them, and whether the link stays forever or vanishes when you stop paying. The first question loses half of them; the third loses the other half.
Then do the maths: if they are selling a hundred links for ninety euros, work out what it costs to publish a hundred articles on a hundred sites with actual readers. It does not add up. What you are buying is something else.
The links that really do harm
Google rarely punishes you for receiving rubbish, not least because anyone can link to you. What it does spot is the pattern of somebody who has built a network to game it. The usual signals are these:
- Blog networks created only to link, with nonsense text and nobody behind them.
- Mass swaps of the «I link you, you link me» kind, repeated across dozens of sites.
- Comments and forums stuffed with your address.
- Links from sites in another language with nothing to do with what you sell.
When that happens what falls is not a ranking: it is the trust you had built up, and winning it back takes months.
How to see which links you have today
Free, and it takes five minutes. Search Console includes a links report listing the sites that link to you most, your most linked pages and the most repeated anchor texts. It is not the most complete tool on the market, but it is the one Google uses.
Check three things: whether the linking sites ring a bell, whether the most linked page is the one you actually want to sell, and whether an anchor repeats in an odd way. The rest of the panel is in what to check in Google Search Console.
What to do about a bad link already pointing at you
The first answer, nearly always, is nothing. Everybody has a couple of strange links and Google ignores them.
If it is serious —hundreds of links from one network, or whatever a previous agency left behind— there is the disavow links tool, which tells Google to ignore them. It is a last resort and it deserves a careful hand: that same file can throw away something that was working.
How many links do you need
It is the question in every meeting and it is the wrong one. It depends who you are up against: to show up for «electrician» in a village of 4,000 people you may need none at all, and to fight for «employment lawyer Barcelona» a hundred will not do it.
The useful version is to look at the three businesses ranking above you for the search you care about and see who links to them. It is nearly always trade bodies, local press and suppliers; it is nearly never magic. And it will take months, like everything here: the real timescales are in how long SEO takes to work.
Links and what the AI answers
When somebody asks an assistant about a service in your area, the answer is built from what has been published about you on sites the model treats as trustworthy. Links count differently there: what matters is being named on pages that talk about your trade and your area, with details that match the ones on your own site.
That is why links from the trade body, the supplier and the county paper do double duty. How to prepare for it is in GEO positioning, and it is part of our GEO service.
We'll tell you in a ten-minute conversation
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
A three-month plan to get backlinks for your website
No paid tools, and no more than a couple of hours a month:
- Month one. List every place you already appear: trade body, suppliers, social profiles, Google listing, old directories. Check the link is there and points where it should.
- Month two. Five emails, one per site, asking them to add or fix the link. Short ones, with the wording already written so they only have to paste it.
- Month three. One thing worth telling: a collaboration, a finished job, a local figure. Publish it on your site and send it to the county paper and the council listings.
Three months of that yields somewhere between five and fifteen links of the kind that last. No agency is going to sell them to you, not least because they are not theirs to sell.
What this costs with us
Our prices do not include links sold by the unit, because they do not depend on us and promising them would be a lie. Link work sits inside the monthly plans, alongside the content and the Google listing, which is where it belongs.
- Tu Landing, 100 € a month: one page, hosting and one mailbox.
- Tu Web, 200 € a month: up to ten subpages, two mailboxes and one article a month so the site does not go stale.
- Presencia Básica, 400 € a month: migration included, ten mailboxes, three articles on your site and three on your Google listing, replies to every review and GEO positioning.
- Presencia Media, 750 € a month: the same with five articles in each place and managed Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns.
- Presencia Avanzada, 1,500 € a month: seven articles in each place, twenty-five mailboxes and two monthly posts on your social channels.
All plus VAT and with no lock-in.
Getting backlinks for your website: what we actually do
Go through where you already appear and fix it, draft the emails so you send them under your own name, write the content that gives people a reason to link to you, and keep an eye on Search Console for anything odd. What we do not do is buy links or guarantee a number: anyone who guarantees that knows something Google does not. The underlying work is SEO.
From Sant Antoni de Calonge, with businesses across Girona and Barcelona
If one of those emails has just landed and you are not sure whether it is worth anything, forward it to us through the contact form or by WhatsApp and we will tell you what is behind it. And if you would rather start with the easy part, we will send you the list of places your website should be and is not.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.