How to create a backlink (and which ones are worth creating)

TL;DR

• There are only three kinds of backlink you can create on your own: profile links, directory listings, and links on sites where you already have a relationship.
• None of those three are the ones that move rankings. The links that count are the ones someone else decided to give you.
• Google’s spam policies treat bought links, swapped links and mass guest posting as link spam. Usually they’re quietly ignored rather than punished, which means you paid for nothing.
• For a UK service business, 10 relevant local links beat 500 random ones, every time.
• Start with the page you want to rank, make it worth linking to, then go and ask the five or six people in your town who already have a reason to mention you.

If you’re searching for how to create a backlink, here’s the honest answer up front. You can directly create about three kinds, and none of them are the ones that shift a competitive ranking. The rest have to be earned or asked for.

That sounds like bad news. To be honest, it’s the opposite. It means the job is smaller and far more concrete than most link-building advice makes it sound.

So below are the three types you can place yourself today, the five-step process for getting the rest, and the ones I’d stay well away from.

What is a backlink, and why does it still matter?

A backlink is a link on someone else’s website that points to a page on yours. Google follows those links and treats each one as a small vote that your page is worth showing to people.

Two things decide whether that vote counts for anything: who is linking, and whether Google can actually read the link. Google’s own link best practices are specific about the mechanics. A link needs a proper anchor tag with a real URL in the href, plus descriptive anchor text, or it may not be seen at all.

That’s more common than you’d expect. Links buried in JavaScript buttons, image maps or “click to visit” widgets often pass nothing.

Can you create a backlink yourself, or do you have to earn it?

You can create three kinds yourself: profile links, directory listings, and links on sites where you already have a relationship. Everything beyond that has to be asked for or earned.

Here’s the split worth keeping in your head:

• Links you can place today. Your Google Business Profile website field, a Yell or FreeIndex listing, a trade-body membership page, a supplier’s stockist page, your own LinkedIn profile.
• Links you can ask for. A local paper write-up, a partner’s blog post, a sponsorship page, a supplier case study, a local charity’s thank-you page.
• Links you can only earn. Someone reads a page of yours, finds it useful, and cites it without ever telling you.

Most of the placeable ones carry a nofollow tag. Google changed nofollow to a hint rather than a hard rule back in 2019, and a link tagged sponsored or nofollow generally won’t pass ranking credit. They still help people find you and keep your business details consistent. They just won’t win you a competitive term on their own.

How to create a backlink in five steps

This is the process I’d use for any single link, whether it’s a directory listing or a mention in the local paper.

1. Pick the page first. Not the home page by default. If you want a boiler-service page to rank, the link should point at that page, or at something closely related to it. Most owners send every link to the home page and wonder why the service pages never move.

2. Make the page worth linking to. Nobody links to a 200-word service page with three stock photos on it. Google’s guidance on helpful content is the right bar here: does the page answer the question better than what’s already ranking? If not, fix that before you ask anyone for anything.

3. Find a site with a real reason to link. Not “a site with high domain authority”. A reason. You sponsor their under-11s team, you supply their café, you’re a member of their trade body, you fixed something for them last month.

4. Ask once, like a human. One short email, no template, naming the specific page and why it’s useful to their readers. If they say no or say nothing, move on. Chasing turns a warm contact cold.

5. Check the link is real. Open the page, view source, confirm there’s an anchor tag pointing at your URL, and check whether it carries a nofollow. Plenty of “links” turn out to be plain text, a redirect through a tracking script, or an image with no link at all.

How to create a backlink that Google actually counts

A link counts when it sits on a page real people visit, on a site that covers your subject or your area, and when it was given rather than bought.

Ahrefs tested that first point directly. Links from pages that get search traffic line up better with higher rankings than links from pages nobody visits. That single filter removes most of what gets sold as link building.

So before you chase a link, run it past four questions:

1. Would a real customer of mine ever land on that page?
2. Is the site about my subject, my industry, or my town?
3. Is the link editorial, meaning a person chose to add it?
4. Is it one of five links on the page, or one of 200?

If the answer to any of those is uncomfortable, the link is not worth the effort.

Where local businesses actually get links

In my experience, almost every useful link a local business gets comes from something the owner was already doing in the town.

At CoLaz, the group I grew from 1 location to 9 between 2016 and 2022, we never ran an outreach campaign. The links came from sponsoring local events, being listed on partner and supplier pages, local press picking up a new opening, and membership pages for the trade bodies we were already paying to belong to. Each new location repeated the same short list.

The lesson I’d lift out of those six years: local links compound, they don’t spike. Year one felt like nothing was happening. Year three was when the curve bent, and by then the position was genuinely hard for a competitor to take. You can read the CoLaz story if you want the longer version.

If your bookings come from a specific town, that town is where the links should come from. That’s the whole basis of local SEO, and it’s cheaper than any national link campaign you’ll be pitched.

Should you buy backlinks?

No, and the reason is more boring than the risk of a penalty. Google’s spam policies name buying and selling links, excessive link exchanges, and large-scale guest posting with keyword-stuffed anchor text as link spam.

Most of the time nothing dramatic happens. The links get quietly discounted, the rankings don’t move, and you’ve spent money on nothing. That’s the normal outcome, not the horror story.

The horror story is the other one: a manual action in Search Console, which means a human reviewer looked at your link profile and decided it was built to game the ranking. Cleaning that up takes months and it is entirely avoidable.

By the way, this applies to the packages sold as “500 high-quality backlinks”. Nobody sells 500 editorial links. They sell 500 pages nobody reads.

Do directory and profile links still count?

Yes, but not for the reason most people assume. Directory and citation listings mostly earn their keep by keeping your name, address and phone number consistent everywhere, which supports local pack visibility rather than general ranking power.

Google’s guidance on local ranking leans on relevance, distance and prominence. Consistent listings across the UK directory ecosystem feed prominence. Scattered or contradictory ones quietly work against you.

They also do a job that has nothing to do with Google. BrightLocal’s consumer research has tracked for years how many people check listings and reviews before choosing a local business. Getting the details right on 15 directories is a couple of afternoons of work, once.

Do that alongside your Google Business Profile rather than instead of it. The profile is the half of the job that pays back faster.

How many backlinks do you need to rank?

Fewer than you think, and more consistently than you think. There’s no number, because it depends entirely on what the current top three pages have.

The wider context is bleak and useful at the same time. Ahrefs found that 96.55% of pages get no search traffic from Google at all, and a big part of that is having no links pointing at them whatsoever. Getting from zero to a handful of relevant links puts you ahead of most of the web.

The other half of the picture is that pages holding the top spots keep picking up new referring domains over time. So the target isn’t a total. It’s a habit: a small number of real links, every quarter, forever.

How long does a new backlink take to do anything?

Usually weeks, sometimes months, and almost never days. Google has to crawl the linking page, decide the link is genuine, and then re-evaluate your page against everything else competing for that term.

For a local service business I’d expect the first useful signals inside 60 to 90 days once the links start landing, with real compounding around month 6. Anyone telling you differently is either talking about a keyword nobody searches for, or overselling.

Don’t worry if the first month looks flat. Flat is what month one looks like.

What if you’ve already built bad links?

Start by checking whether it’s actually a problem. Open Search Console and look at the manual actions report. If it’s clean, Google is most likely ignoring the bad links rather than holding them against you, and the right move is to leave them alone.

If there is a manual action, that’s when the disavow tool comes in. It’s a last resort, not routine housekeeping. Used carelessly it removes links that were helping you.

The more common version of this problem is inherited: an agency ran a link campaign, the contract ended, and nobody knows what was built. Auditing that properly is one of the first things I do in an SEO consulting engagement, because it changes what everything else is worth.

Where I’d start this week

Here’s what I’d actually do, in order. Pick the one page that would make the biggest difference to your bookings if it ranked. Improve it until it’s genuinely the best answer on the first page. Then write down every organisation in your town that already knows your name: suppliers, trade bodies, the charity you sponsor, the club, the local paper.

That list is usually five to ten names, and it’s the entire link plan for the next quarter. It’s slow, it’s unglamorous, and it’s the only version that holds up.

If you’d like an honest read on where your own site stands before you start, book a call and bring the URL. Twenty minutes, and I’ll tell you whether links are your next move or a distraction.