Search engines conduct link analysis as they explore millions of pages of internet data. In the process, sophisticated algorithms uncover the relations between website pages and the importance of content in a ranking context. In essence, this is a digital popularity contest. Knowing how best to compete is a vital element of SEO performance. Search engines establish the popularity of individual websites by analysing links pointing to them. They also assess trust, authority and spam. Trustworthy sites link to others that are respected, while sites riddled with spam do not attract links from trusted sources and are regarded less favourably by SEO.

• Link building is crucial for achieving superior organic search rankings
• Google ranks websites by assessing high-quality links to their pages
• Content includes anchor text that search engines rank by relevance and incidence of searches
• Links from trusted domains result in significant boost to trust scoring metric
• Government, educational and not for profit sites are good examples of high-trust domains