What Is Netlinking in SEO? Meaning, Methods and Risks

"Netlinking" is what French SEO professionals call link building. If a guide or a brief uses the word, it means the same thing: getting other websites to link to yours.

This guide explains what that involves, whether links still matter, which methods are worth your time, and where the risks are.

What netlinking means

Netlinking is the set of actions you take to earn links from other sites to your own. Those incoming links are called backlinks. French SEO publication Abondance defines it in exactly those terms, and names "link building" as the English equivalent. It also points out that backlinks have been one of Google's main ranking signals since the beginning.

The idea is simple. A link from one site to another works like a recommendation. Search engines use those recommendations to find pages and to judge which ones other people trust.

You'll see the same practice under other names: link building, backlink acquisition, off-page SEO. The tactics are identical. Only the vocabulary changes by market.

Do links still matter?

Yes, but less than the industry likes to say.

There's a lot of data showing that pages with more links tend to rank higher. Backlinko analyzed 11.8 million Google search results and found that the number one result has, on average, 3.8 times more backlinks than the results in positions two to ten (the study was last updated in April 2025). That's a correlation. It doesn't prove that links cause the rankings. Strong pages attract links because they're strong.

Google is careful about it too. At PubCon in September 2023, Google's Gary Illyes said links are important, but that people overestimate how important they are, and that they haven't been a top-three ranking factor for some time. He also said you can rank without links.

What to take from that:

• Links help, especially for competitive searches.
• Content comes first. A weak page with strong links is still a weak page.
• Chasing link quantity is the wrong goal. A few links from relevant, trusted sites beat hundreds from sites nobody reads.

A short history: from link farms to spam filters

In the early days of search, more links meant better rankings, so people built links in bulk: link farms, directories, swaps with anyone who'd agree.

Google launched its Penguin update on 24 April 2012 to fight exactly that. It targeted sites that pushed rankings up by manipulating the number of links pointing at them.

In September 2016, Google announced that Penguin had become part of its core algorithm and now runs in real time. It also changed how spam links are treated. Google said it devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site.

In practice, low-quality links are now mostly ignored rather than punished. That's good news if you slip up, and a reminder that spammy links don't help.

Netlinking methods that work

There's no single tactic. Most good campaigns mix several.

Content people want to cite. Original research, useful tools, clear guides and data. Other sites link to these without being asked, though you'll usually still need to tell people they exist.

Guest posts. You write an article for a relevant site and get a link in return. It works when the site has a real audience and the article is genuinely useful. Our page on guest posting explains how we handle it.

Link insertions (niche edits). Instead of a new article, your link is added to an existing, relevant one. It's quick, and it's only as good as the page it goes on. See niche edits.

Expert quotes and digital PR. Journalists and bloggers need sources. If you have real expertise or data, you can earn a mention and a link. See expert quote link building.

Blogger outreach. Contacting site owners directly to suggest a link, a feature or a collaboration. It's slow and it's manual, which is exactly why it works. See blogger outreach.

Broken link building. You find a dead link on a relevant page and suggest your own page as the replacement. It only works if you have a page that fits.

What about buying links?

Be careful here, because this is where most of the risk sits.

Google's spam policies say that buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam. The same goes for excessive link exchanges. The policies also say that paid links aren't a violation as long as they carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". We explain those values in our guide to link rel attributes, and why swaps go wrong in link exchange.

French SEO sources are just as direct. Abondance notes that buying links is against Google's guidelines unless the links are marked with sponsored or nofollow, that it's widespread anyway, and that the risks are links being neutralized or a manual action.

So it comes down to how you do it. Paying for a placement on a real site, with relevant content that a person would want to read, is one thing. Paying a network for a pile of links is another.

When we place links for clients, whether a publisher labels a placement depends on the publisher and the country. If a placement will carry a label, we tell you before you approve the site, and you decide whether to go ahead.

How to judge a link before you go after it

Ask these questions:

1. Is the site relevant to yours? A link from a site your customers actually read is worth more than one from a random high-authority site.
2. Does it have real traffic and real readers? Look for a site that gets visitors, not just one with a good score.
3. Is the link in the body of useful content? Links in editorial context work better than links in footers or sidebars.
4. Does the anchor text read naturally? Overly keyword-stuffed anchors are a warning sign.
5. Does the site sell links to anyone? If every article carries a paid link, it's probably not a site worth being on.

A note on metrics. Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz score and Domain Rating (DR) is an Ahrefs score. Both are third-party estimates. They're useful for comparing sites quickly, but they aren't Google's scores, so don't treat them as targets.

Netlinking across countries and languages

If you sell in several markets, links from sites in the target country and language usually make more sense than generic ones. A German page linked from German sites sends a clearer signal than the same page linked from sites in other languages. That's a judgment rather than a rule, but it's why we build international link building campaigns market by market.

Where to start with netlinking

1. Fix the page first. Pick the page you want links to and make it worth linking to.
2. Look at what your competitors have. A backlink tool shows which sites link to them and not to you.
3. Start with relevant sites. Ten good links teach you more than a hundred bad ones.
4. Mix methods. Content, outreach, guest posts and insertions each cover different ground.
5. Track what happens. Note which links go live, and watch rankings and referral traffic over months, not days.

If you'd rather hand it off, we run manual outreach where you choose the sites from a shortlist and approve the content before anything is published. Our how it works section walks through the steps, and you can get in touch to talk about your markets.

Sources

Checked on 30 September 2026.

• Abondance: Netlinking definition (French)
• Backlinko: We analyzed 11.8 million Google search results (updated April 2025)
• Search Engine Roundtable: Google says links are no longer a top three ranking factor (PubCon, September 2023)
• Wikipedia: Google Penguin (release date 24 April 2012)
• Google Search Central blog: Penguin is now part of our core algorithm (September 2016)
• Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search (updated August 2026)