Ask ten marketers what link building is and you will get ten answers, most of them slightly defensive. The underlying idea has barely changed in twenty five years. What has changed is everything around it: what counts as a good link, who decides, and how much work it takes to earn one without creating a problem for yourself. Here is the short version, and where a platform like ours actually fits.
The idea, in one paragraph
Search engines need a way to separate a page that matters from a page that merely exists. One of the earliest answers, and still one of the most durable, was to treat a link as a vote. If a site points at you, some of its standing travels with the click. PageRank, the algorithm Google was built on in 1998, formalised exactly that: a page linked to by pages that are themselves well linked is probably worth showing.
Two things followed immediately. Links became valuable. And anything valuable gets manufactured.
How it got gamed
The first decade of link building was mostly about volume. Directory submissions, reciprocal link pages, comment sections, forum signatures, article sites that existed for no reason except to link out, and networks of sites built to point at each other. Almost none of it had anything to do with whether a reader would benefit from following the link, which was the entire point of the original idea.
It worked for a while. That is why so much of it happened.
What Google did about it
The response arrived in stages, and each one narrowed the gap between a link and a link that counts.
- 2005. The rel=“nofollow” attribute gave site owners a way to mark a link they did not vouch for. Paid and user submitted links were meant to carry it.
- 2012. The Penguin update began demoting sites whose link profiles looked manufactured. For a lot of people, this is the moment link building stopped being a numbers game.
- 2019. Google introduced rel=“sponsored” for paid placements and rel=“ugc” for user generated content, and said nofollow would be treated as a hint rather than a directive. The ask was to label the relationship rather than hide it.
- 2022. The December link spam update used SpamBrain, Google’s machine learning spam detection, to identify both sites buying links and sites selling them, and to discount the credit rather than simply punish a page.
The direction never changed. Volume stopped working. Relevance, context and plausibility started to.
What harder looks like in practice
Done properly today, a placement has to survive several questions at once. Is the publication actually read by anyone, or does it only rank? Does the subject fit what that site normally covers, or does the piece look like a slot bought by someone who has never read it? Is the writing good enough that an editor would run it without wincing? And what is a fair price, when almost nobody publishes one?
There is also the disclosure question, which plenty of people would rather not discuss. If a placement is paid for, Google’s guidance is that the link should be qualified, with rel=“sponsored” or nofollow. That sounds like it removes the point. In practice it moves the point: what you are buying is the mention, the context and the audience, rather than a transfer of ranking credit that was never meant to be for sale.
Then answer engines arrived
The newest wrinkle is that search is no longer the only thing reading the web. Systems that generate answers draw on the pages they have crawled, and they lean on sources that look editorially credible. A brand mentioned inside a real article, on a publication people actually read, is the kind of page that gets summarised back to a user. A line in a directory is not. It is one of the few genuinely new arguments for editorial placement in years, and it does not depend on link equity at all.
The Nordic version of the problem
Now do all of that across Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Four media landscapes, four sets of editorial habits and four languages, one of which is not even Scandinavian: Finnish is Finno-Ugric, a relative of Estonian rather than Swedish, and an English draft pushed through translation gives itself away in the first sentence. Prices are quoted by email and move depending on who is asking. Metrics come from three different tools. Most of the work is not strategy, it is admin.
Where Fjordio comes in
We built the platform we wanted back when we were doing this ourselves, on both sides of the invoice.
- 2,800+ Nordic publications listed with the price on the listing, not on request.
- Ahrefs DR, Moz DA and organic traffic side by side, so there is no new scoring system to learn.
- Every publisher checked before it is listed, because a domain built to sell placements is not a publication.
- Content in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and English, written to the site’s own guidelines, or bring your own article.
- One account, one basket, one invoice, in the currency you already pay in.
- Nothing goes live until you have approved it.
None of this makes link building simple again, and it was never meant to be. The value of a mention comes from the fact that somebody with a reputation to protect decided to publish it. What a platform can remove is the part that is merely tedious: finding the sites, guessing the price, chasing the reply and reconciling six invoices at the end of the month.
If that sounds like your month, have a look at how it works for advertisers.