Link Building ep 8 : Building versus Buying Backlinks
From SEO Is Not That Hard by Edd Dawson
November 21, 2025 · 14 min · Season 1 · Episode 341
About this episode
This episode discusses the differences between building and buying backlinks and the implications for SEO.
Send a text If your backlink comes with a receipt, it’s probably a liability. We break down the crucial difference between buying placements and earning genuine editorial links, tracing the story from PageRank to Penguin to today’s AI-driven search where citations and trust decide who gets surfaced. Along the way, we show how to avoid risky shortcuts and build a durable system for attracting links that actually move rankings. We start by unpacking why Google treats paid links as manipulation...
People in this episode
Host: Edd Dawson
Topics covered
- link building
- backlinks
- SEO strategies
- Google algorithms
- digital marketing
Keywords
- backlinks
- link building
- SEO
- PageRank
- Penguin
- AI-driven search
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Google, PageRank, Penguin, AI
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