Link building is often described as “getting backlinks,” but Google’s own guidance makes the real goal clearer: earn signals of trust and relevance by creating pages that genuinely help people, and by making it easy for others to reference your work naturally. In Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines (SQRG), raters are repeatedly instructed to look for trustworthiness and independent reputation evidence—not hype created by the site itself.
A useful way to think about white hat link building is: make something worth citing, then help the right people discover it—without manipulating linking signals. Below are practical strategies that map closely to how Google describes quality, reputation, and link spam.
White hat links are a byproduct of strong main content (MC): content that demonstrates effort, originality, accuracy, and usefulness. The Search Quality Rater Guidelines frames quality around whether a page achieves its purpose well and can be trusted—especially on Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics (health, finance, safety, civic information).
What earns editorial links consistently:
Original research: surveys, benchmarks, experiments, unique datasets.
Definitive explainers: unusually clear guides, decision trees, checklists, glossaries.
Tools and calculators: lightweight utilities people reference to solve a real problem.
Comparisons and “best of” pages with real methodology: not thin affiliate fluff.
If your page is “fine” but replaceable, the link ceiling is low. If it’s the page someone needs to cite to be credible, links become much easier.
The Search Quality Rater Guideline is explicit that Trust is central, and that a rater’s assessment should be informed by: what you say about yourself, what others say about you (independent sources), and what’s visible on the page.
For link building, this means:
Add clear author bylines and bios that match the topic (experience/expertise).
Show sources, citations, and editorial standards where appropriate.
Publish original work you can stand behind (and update it).
Reduce conflicts of interest: The Search Quality Rater Guideline notes that paid promotion and “reviews” with incentives are less trustworthy.
The goal isn’t “look authoritative.” It’s “be verifiably credible.”
One of the most overlooked Search Quality Rater Guideline passages for marketers: raters are told to look for reputation sources not created by the website itself, using searches that exclude your domain (e.g., [brand -site:brand.com]).
Translate that into strategy:
Pursue digital PR that results in independent coverage: expert commentary, data stories, trend reports, journalist-friendly resources.
Contribute to industry roundups only when your contribution is substantive and attributable.
Encourage real customers/clients to leave reviews on reputable platforms where relevant (don’t astroturf).
This approach produces the kinds of third-party references that align with how quality is evaluated.
Google’s Search Essentials literally recommends: “Tell people about your site. Be active in communities where you can tell like-minded people…”. That’s outreach—but done in a way that helps people find genuinely useful resources.
White hat outreach patterns:
Resource outreach: find pages that curate helpful links and suggest your resource only if it clearly improves their list.
Journalist outreach: pitch stories backed by data, not “please link to me.”
Expert outreach: offer a quote, a graph, or a small insight that makes their content better.
A good test: if the recipient removes the link, your relationship and reputation should still improve because you were helpful.
These tactics are white hat because you’re not manufacturing fake signals—you’re fixing real-world references:
Unlinked brand mentions: when someone references you but didn’t link, politely ask if they’d add a source link.
Broken link building (ethical version): identify dead resources your audience relied on, publish a legitimate replacement, then notify pages still linking to the dead URL.
Outdated citations: if sites cite old stats, offer updated numbers and a clean source page.
Google’s link best practices emphasize crawlable links and descriptive anchor text that helps users and Google understand what they’re clicking.
This matters for link building because editors prefer linking to pages that are easy to reference, stable, and clear.
Do this on your site:
Use descriptive, non-clickbait titles and headings.
Keep URLs clean and persistent.
Use internal linking intentionally; Google recommends ensuring important pages have at least one internal link and that links provide context.
Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links primarily to manipulate rankings and list examples that include buying/selling links, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation, and paid guest posts that pass ranking credit.
Key takeaways for staying white hat:
Don’t buy links for rankings.
Avoid “link to me and I’ll link to you” at scale; Google explicitly calls out excessive exchanges.
If you are paying for sponsorship/advertising, use appropriate link qualifications (e.g., rel="sponsored"/nofollow)—Google notes paid links are fine when properly qualified.
White hat link building is slower than shortcuts, but it compounds. Build pages that deserve to be referenced, demonstrate E-E-A-T with real evidence, earn independent reputation signals, and promote your work in relevant communities without manipulating link credit. That’s the strategy that aligns best with what Google describes as quality, and it’s also the strategy least likely to break the next time Google tightens enforcement around link spam.