Burroughs Digital provides link building services — the discipline of earning links from other websites to yours. Links remain among Google’s strongest ranking signals because they function as citations: independent websites vouching that your business is real, relevant, and worth referencing. A site with authoritative links outranks an identical site without them, in nearly every market, nearly every time.
Link building is also the most abused discipline in SEO, which is why ours comes with a philosophy stated up front: we build links you could explain to a Google engineer without sweating. No purchased link farms, no spun guest posts on fake blogs, no private blog networks. Those shortcuts are precisely what our penalty recovery service exists to clean up after — we won’t build you a future cleanup project.
Link building is part of our complete SEO services practice. Request a free audit to see your link profile against your competitors’.
Why Links Still Decide Competitive Rankings
Content and on-page work get you into the game; links frequently decide who wins it. When two businesses both cover a topic completely, Google breaks the tie with authority — and authority is measured substantially through who links to whom. This is most visible in competitive verticals: legal, medical, home services in dense metros, and national terms, where the link gap between page one and page three is usually the whole story. Our audits quantify that gap so your roadmap targets it deliberately.
How Burroughs Digital Builds Links
Digital PR and earned coverage. The strongest links come from being genuinely referenceable: data, expert commentary, local stories journalists actually want. We build linkable assets and place your expertise — founder-led businesses have a real advantage here, because reporters cite people, not brands.
Local prominence links. For local businesses, links from chambers of commerce, community organizations, sponsorships, local news, and regional directories carry geographic relevance that national links can’t replicate. These reinforce the same prominence signals as your citations — related work, different assets: citations corroborate your business data, links transfer authority.
Content-driven acquisition. Guides, original data, and genuinely useful resources attract links over time — the compounding layer of link building, built jointly with our content marketing service.
Competitor link analysis. Every campaign starts with data: who links to the sites outranking you, which of those links are replicable, and which link types actually correlate with rankings in your market. We pursue what the data supports rather than chasing volume. This may be our most productive technique.
Unlinked mentions and reclamation. Often the fastest wins: places already talking about your business without linking, broken links pointing at your site, and lost links worth recovering.
Cloud blogs. We build on-topic, authoritative cloud blogs at tiered levels that link back to the client and boost your domain authority and rankings.
What We Don’t Do — and Why It Protects You
Google’s link spam systems have grown very good at detecting manufactured authority, and the penalty for it ranges from wasted money (links silently ignored) to catastrophic (manual actions that crater rankings for months). Burroughs Digital doesn’t buy links, doesn’t use link networks, and doesn’t do bulk guest-post outreach to pay-to-play blogs. Every link we pursue passes one test: would this link exist in a world where Google didn’t? If the answer is no, it’s a liability wearing a metric.
That discipline is measurable, and we measure it the same way we measure everything — through our data-driven process: links earned, their authority and relevance, and most importantly the ranking movement on the pages they support. Link building is included in competitive engagements and scoped by market — see pricing.
Link Building — Frequently Asked Questions
Enough to be competitive for your target terms — a number your market sets, not a package tier. A Colorado Springs plumber might need a dozen strong local links; a national campaign might need hundreds. The audit quantifies your specific gap.
Yes. Google has added many signals, but independent studies and Google’s own statements continue to place links among the strongest ranking factors, especially in competitive markets.
Not illegal — but it violates Google’s spam policies, and detected paid links are ignored at best and penalized at worst. We treat purchased links as a risk transfer: the seller keeps the money, you keep the risk.
Citation links (directories, maps services, industry listings) serve data consistency and local prominence more than authority transfer — valuable, but a different job. That work lives in our citation building service; link building targets editorial links that pass authority.
Links typically influence rankings within weeks to a few months of being discovered, and the effect compounds as the profile grows. It’s the slowest-building SEO asset — and the hardest for competitors to replicate once built.