Because a link is one of the few signals that comes from outside your control. Anyone can write that their store is the best. A link and a mention from somewhere else is a third party saying you are worth pointing at.
Off page work is everything that happens away from your own site. Links, brand mentions, reviews, directory listings and the way other people describe you.
It is also the part of the industry with the worst reputation, and deservedly. A large amount of money is spent every year on links that do nothing, and a smaller amount on links that actively cause harm.
What Kinds of Links Are Worth Having?
Links from places a real buyer might actually read. Publications in your category, comparison and review sites, community discussions, suppliers and partners, and organisations you genuinely work with.
The third row is the one most stores can act on immediately. Almost every store has suppliers, stockists, partners and trade bodies who would link to them and have never been asked.
| Source | Why it works | How hard |
|---|---|---|
| Category publications and press | Read by buyers, trusted by search engines, and read by AI tools when they build answers. | Hard, and worth it |
| Comparison and review sites | Sit directly in the buying path and are frequently used as sources for recommendations. | Medium |
| Suppliers, partners, stockists | Real relationships that already exist and are usually unclaimed. | Easy and overlooked |
| Communities and forums | Where buyers ask real questions, and increasingly a source AI tools read. | Medium, and requires participation not promotion |
| Directories and listings | Low value individually, useful for consistency of how your brand is described. | Easy |
| Paid link networks | Nothing, or worse than nothing. | Avoid |
What Do We Refuse to Do?
We do not buy links from networks, place content on sites built only to host links, exchange links in schemes, or use automated tools to create mentions. These carry real risk and produce nothing durable.
This is worth saying plainly because the industry is full of it, and because it is often sold under respectable sounding names. Guest post packages, sponsored placement bundles, and monthly link quotas at suspiciously low prices are usually the same thing wearing different clothes.
The practical problem is not only the risk of a penalty. It is that these links do nothing for the thing that now matters most, which is whether real publications and real communities describe your brand. A link on a site nobody reads is invisible to the systems that build AI answers, because those systems are reading things people actually read.
So the standard we use is simple. If a link would not be worth having in a world with no search engines, because a real person might follow it and buy something, it is probably not worth having at all.
What Do You Do About Bad Links Already Pointing at Your Store?
Usually less than people expect. Most bad links can be safely ignored, and the cases that need action are rarer and more specific than the industry suggests.
Search engines have become good at ignoring low quality links rather than punishing sites for them. That means the panic driven cleanup work sold heavily a few years ago is unnecessary for most stores.
Where it still matters is when a store bought links in the past at scale, or when a competitor has pointed a large volume of obviously manipulated links at you. Both are visible in a review, and both have a defined response.
We look, we tell you what we find, and in most cases we tell you to leave it alone. That is a cheaper answer than the one you would get from a firm selling a cleanup service.
How Many Links Does a Store Need?
There is no number. What matters is whether the pages that need to earn are supported, and whether your brand is mentioned in the places your buyers and the AI tools both read.
Agencies quote monthly link counts because a number is easy to sell and easy to report. It is a poor measure, because ten links to a page nobody visits are worth less than one link to the collection page that carries a third of your revenue.
We work from the pages instead. Which pages need to compete, what is currently supporting them, and what would change the balance. That usually produces a small number of targets rather than a monthly quota.
It also means some months produce one placement and some produce four. We report what was earned and where it points, rather than hitting a number for its own sake.