Are competitors overtaking you even with worse content?
Usually it comes down to links

Link building is an SEO strategy that consists of obtaining backlinks from external websites. This practice is key to improving the position of your pages in search results and to gaining authority in your sector. Backlinks are seen by search engines as evidence of the trustworthiness and relevance of your pages, which can lead to better placement in search results and higher traffic.

The link building process involves identifying suitable link sources, creating content that is attractive for links, communicating with the owners of relevant websites and monitoring results. Investing in link building can help your site rise above the competition and gain users’ attention.

It is important to bear in mind that the quality of links is crucial. Obtaining backlinks from relevant, authoritative sources is important, whereas links from low-quality sites can damage your SEO efforts.

The link building process begins with an analysis of your competitors’ link profiles and the identification of potential link sources. You then create content that is attractive for links and communicate with the owners of relevant websites, offering cooperation or a link exchange.

It is important to have a strategy for maintaining and expanding your link portfolio. This includes regular monitoring and updating of the link profile, tracking developments in SEO results and optimising the strategy in the light of new findings.

The quality of links is the priority in link building. Obtaining links from relevant, authoritative sources is worth more than acquiring links in bulk from low-quality sites.

The time frame for visible results from link building can vary depending on various factors, such as the level of competition in your sector, the quality and number of links you obtain and the current state of your link profile.

You can usually expect the first positive results after several months of active link building. Nevertheless, link building is a long-term strategy, so it is important to be patient and to monitor the development of your links and SEO results regularly. Long-term, systematic work on link building will help you achieve lasting results and sustainable growth for your site.

Google’s algorithm uses hundreds of factors to rate pages, and the evaluation of links is among them. One factor that remains important is the number of links. Even today this criterion is still one of the most important factors in how Google evaluates links, but it cannot be assessed in isolation. There is no point in obtaining large numbers of links from pages that are neither relevant nor reliable. Quantity needs to be aligned with other factors, such as the diversity of links. Imagine you are a member of a football team and all your team-mates say you are a great striker. Fair enough. You are probably not bad. But if your opponents, the coaches of other teams, sports journalists and agents start saying it too, then there is probably something in it. Your value goes up.

Google thinks in the same way. For a search engine, a site demonstrates stronger authority when links to it come from several different domains. That is why the diversity of links is also included in the evaluation. Closely related to this is the context of links. To stay with the footballer example, articles about your play in the sports pages will probably help your career more than tabloid pieces about where you were, with whom and what you were doing.

Google and Seznam can also understand the context around a link in order to judge whether it is genuinely relevant. To begin with, the search engine understands that links from sites in the same field as the target site are more valuable, because they are more likely to be relevant to the site’s audience. It also evaluates the words that appear around the link, known as co-occurrence. These help the search engine to understand the topic of the page and whether the link makes sense in the given context. That is why at Mediatoring we are very keen on using links from contextually related sites and articles – for this we use, for example, the article-buying system Placla.

Besides words, Google also evaluates other links located nearby. If these are also links to quality pages, the page gains greater relevance and passes on more link juice. Of course, a lot also depends on the position of the links. If a link is part of the main content of the page, such as an article, there is a good chance it was inserted with editorial intent and will therefore ultimately have greater value, especially at the beginning of the text. If, however, it is in the header or footer and repeats on every page of the domain, it is more likely to serve merely to generate a backlink and is therefore valued less.

An important factor is the link text itself – the anchor text (the text of the anchor). This is in fact the text that can be clicked on. It says a great deal about the page being linked to. It usually contains a keyword or a short description of what the user will find on the page after clicking the link. Google therefore uses this factor when indexing pages. At the same time it is worth remembering diversity here too. If everyone chants in unison that you are a SUPER PLAYER, it will sound good, but a little artificial, don’t you think? A search engine does not want to be deceived.

If, therefore, the same key phrase or keyword is used repeatedly in all backlinks, Google will regard this unnatural usage as the use of black hat techniques. When backlinks are obtained naturally, anchor texts tend to be varied. And trustworthy. Alongside PageRank, therefore, what is known as TrustRank has also evolved; it is concerned with the trustworthiness and reliability of pages. The closer you are to trustworthy sites, the more trustworthy you appear to Google and the more link juice you gain. Trustworthy sites are those that help to create a safer and more relevant web for users. When assessing reliability, the search algorithm takes into account factors such as the age of the domain, the use of security certificates and the quality of the content.

The speed at which links are acquired is another factor that search engines monitor. In the early days of SEO, backlinks were a key tool of black hat techniques – practices used to deceive search engines. Many websites created link farms or used extensive schemes for buying, exchanging and selling links. In this way they acquired backlinks quickly. To counter this, Google strengthened its algorithm so that it identifies and penalises these practices. One of the measures used is how quickly your pages acquire links. Obtaining many links in a short period usually indicates a black hat scheme, because a natural link profile grows gradually. That is why we never begin cooperation if a customer is interested only in a one-off campaign and in quickly acquiring a large quantity of backlinks. On the contrary, we pride ourselves on long-term cooperation. With a number of clients we have been working on link building for more than ten years.

Links have been important from the very beginning of the web. The World Wide Web – the universe known today as the Internet – can be simply defined as a vast collection of interconnected documents. It is links that are responsible for those connections, allowing users to move between pages, sites, images, videos and other files.

When crawling and evaluating web pages, search engines rely on links just as people do. In the early days of the Internet, search engines were limited to indexing and arranging pages in alphabetical order or in directories (arts, sport, news and so on). Sites had to register in order to appear in these indexes. This was somewhere around the mid-1990s. Catalogues, link directories and portals such as Yahoo played the leading role at that time. At a time when relatively few websites existed, this way of browsing the web was perfectly adequate. But as soon as the volume of users, websites, content and searches increased dramatically, search engines had to improve their algorithms in order to provide better search results.

So first of all the search engines removed the need for sites to register. Search providers began actively looking for sites themselves in order to index them, catalogue them and add them to their databases. And that is essentially how it still works today: links reveal the paths of the web to search engine robots, which crawl web pages and index new content or updates.

PageRank took several factors into account when ranking sites in the search index. The algorithm analysed the content of a page on the basis of keywords, and its popularity on the internet as measured through the network of links. The aim was to measure the relevance of a page by the number of links it received from other pages. The same logic was used as in the academic world: the more citations an author receives, the greater their authority in the field. So the more links a site receives, the more relevant it is in its area.

After that there was no longer any point in ranking sites alphabetically. It became necessary to analyse what pages offered and whether they contained the answers users were looking for. At this point in the story Google came to the fore. The world’s most popular search engine today began its journey by introducing an algorithm that revolutionised search: PageRank.

It was not long before the first “SEO optimisers” started to respond – people who realised that for a page to become successful, people have to find out about it. And where better than in the top positions in search engines. The first publications and studies began to appear. Here in the Czech Republic one of the first publications was the one entitled Velký průvodce SEO by Michal Kubíček, the current owner of the Mediatoring agency.

Search engine programmers soon realised that the number of links was not enough to measure a site’s relevance, because an SEO consultant – a link builder – can easily create hundreds of links. Google therefore began to take into account the diversity and quality of the pages from which the backlinks came. Seznam then started to use an algorithm built on a similar, though not entirely identical, basis. Search engine algorithms established that when quality pages from different domains create links, the page they link to gains a share of their authority, commonly referred to as link juice. A page that links to another shows web search engines the path they should take and the URLs with which it shares its authority. Links are therefore essential for crawling and evaluating web pages in search engines.

There is no single number; context decides. For a site that has had no links until now, fifty links in a month looks suspicious. For an established project it is a normal pace. That is why we work in waves, watch the distribution of anchor texts and mix types of sources so that the profile grows naturally.

Often yes, and that in itself is not a problem. The problem is a series of identical texts on sites with no readers and no editorial team. That is why we choose media that have their own traffic, write the text so that it makes sense to the reader and do not keep using the same phrase in the link. The benefit then shows in rankings and in traffic from the article.

Indirectly, yes. Models draw on sources that can be traced on the web and are rated as trustworthy. When you are written about on sites that carry weight, the chance grows that AI will cite you as an example of a supplier or a source of information. A mention without a link also helps, because the model associates the company name with the topic.

Evaluate them first, do not delete them wholesale. Some old links from directories are harmless and removing them would only weaken the profile. For genuinely problematic sources we request removal and deal with the rest using the disavow tool. Always with documentation, so that it does not have to be done blindly all over again in a year.