Why does Google care who links to you?
Because a link is a small public recommendation. When a regional tourism site, a local newspaper or a respected wine writer links to a winery, each is telling its readers the page is worth a look, and Google treats that as one sign of trust among many. Google Search Central's "SEO Starter Guide" also notes the plainer job: links are how Google discovers pages in the first place, so a new page with no links to it can sit unfound for a long time.
Quality outweighs quantity by a long way. One link from the regional tourism association's "where to taste" page is worth more than hundreds from websites that have nothing to do with wine or the South West.
Which links help, and which can hurt?
Google's "Spam policies for Google web search" define link spam as links made mainly to manipulate rankings, and list the usual suspects: buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, large-scale article swaps built around links, and automated programs that create links. The safe test is whether the link would exist if Google did not.
| Kind of link | How it comes about | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Local news story | The business did something worth reporting | Helps, and sends readers |
| Tourism or industry listing | Membership or an application | Helps, relevant to the area |
| Supplier or partner page | A real working relationship | Helps a little |
| Paid guest post on an unrelated blog | Bought in a package | Can count against you |
| Directory farm with thousands of links | Automatic submission | Ignored at best |
Where did a Margaret River winery's best links come from? (example figures)
A family winery near Margaret River with a cellar door and a small restaurant was paying an overseas agency $450 a month for "30 backlinks". After eight months the links were on blogs about car insurance, crypto and furniture, and the winery's cellar door page still did not appear in the first page of results for "cellar door margaret river".
The owner cancelled and spent the next $450 a month differently: a long lunch with a guest winemaker, written up by the local paper; a page listing the region's dog-friendly cellar doors, which a regional tourism site and two travel blogs linked to; and an application to the regional wine association's member directory. Over a year that produced 11 links, every one from a site about the region, food or wine, and around 140 visitors a month arriving from those sites directly. The cellar door page moved onto the first page of results for its main search, where the agency's 240 links had left it stuck.
How do you see who links to you?
Google Search Console shows it, free. Open the Links report and read Top linking sites and Top linked pages. Paid tools such as Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush show more, with their own scores attached, but the Search Console list is drawn from what Google itself has found.
What does CoraVision do with backlinks?
CoraVision does not read your backlinks, and it never builds or buys links. What it does read every night, once Google Analytics 4 is connected, is visits by channel, and the links that send people show up there as referral visits, which is the part of a backlink you can count. When earning links is part of a strategy in your plan, such as becoming the name people know in your town, Cora teaches the steps on your own screen.
Questions
Should I pay for a backlink package?
Be very wary. Google's spam policies treat buying links to manipulate rankings as link spam, and packages of dozens of links from unrelated blogs are the pattern Google looks for. Money spent on something worth linking to, such as an event or a useful local guide, buys links that last.
What is a nofollow link?
A link marked with rel="nofollow", which tells Google not to pass ranking credit through it. Google asks sites to mark paid links rel="sponsored" and user comments rel="ugc". These links still send visitors, and Google treats the labels as hints about how to read them.