What to do differently starting now

Lesson 50 of 50Module 9 · The future of link building5 min read

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

Change one: stop discarding nofollow coverage from your reporting

This is the cheapest change on the list and the one with the largest effect on behavior, because reporting drives what teams chase.

Today, most link reports have a followed-links number at the top. Everything else is a footnote or is not there at all. That headline metric quietly instructs everyone that a national feature with an unfollowed link is worth less than a followed link from a directory, which is nonsense.

Replace the headline with placements earned, and record for each one: publication, estimated reach or a tier you defined in advance, topical fit, whether you were quoted or merely mentioned, syndication pickup, and link status as one field. Keep followed links as a sub-total — it is real, useful diagnostic information — but stop letting it be the score.

Module 8 covers building a report that survives scrutiny from a CFO who has heard SEO promises before. The version of that report that counts placements rather than attributes is not softer. It is more defensible, because it describes what the program actually produced.

Change two: track mentions as well as links

You almost certainly have link monitoring. Add mention monitoring on the brand, the product names and the two or three people who speak publicly for the business.

Score each mention on the criteria from Lesson 9.2 — does the source get read, is the context topical, is the naming consistent, is the source independent, are you the subject or the scenery. Then do two things with the list. Route the high-value unlinked ones into reclamation outreach, which remains one of the best-yielding tactics on this site because the hard part already happened. And keep the total as a trend line, because association is cumulative and a trend is the only sensible way to look at it.

One caution worth repeating: do not let mention volume become a vanity number. It is trivially inflatable by syndication and scraping. Report independent sources, not raw count, or you have recreated the exact mistake the industry made with link counts.

Change three: fix your entity consistency

Lesson 9.3 has the detail. Here is the version you can execute in an afternoon, and I would do it before any other new work in this module because it is concrete, cheap and it makes everything else compound.

1. Pick the canonical form of your organization name. Write it down. Circulate it.
2. Audit where it appears — site, structured data, social profiles, listings, press boilerplate, media kit — and fix every variant.
3. Publish Organization markup on one canonical page, with accurate sameAs values for profiles you control and use.
4. Give named people Person markup, connected to the organization, with their own sameAs.
5. Standardize the attribution line you give journalists, and use it in your own bylines.
6. Make the About page state the basic facts plainly: what you do, who runs it, where, since when.

Nothing on that list is speculative. It is true today, it was true five years ago, and it will be true regardless of which way the argument in this module resolves. That is what makes it the right place to start.

Change four: make yourself worth quoting

Everything in Lesson 9.4 pointed at the same conclusion. Systems that compose answers need specific, attributable material. So does a journalist on deadline. So does a podcast host looking for a guest with something to say.

In practice that means three habits, all of which Module 6 teaches in detail:

• Publish original data. Numbers only you have, with the method stated. Nothing else earns citation as reliably, and nothing else is as difficult for a competitor to copy.
• Put a named person behind the claims. An expert with a track record, a byline and a stable identity, not an anonymous house voice.
• Write self-contained passages. A paragraph that answers a question without needing the three above it. Good for readers, easier to quote, and structurally easier to retrieve.

This is not a new content strategy. It is the existing one, with the emphasis moved from producing pages to producing quotable claims.

What not to change

The longer list, and the more important one.

Keep building links. Everything in Modules 1 through 8 still works. It also still decays — on my own profile, 49.6% of all links ever recorded are gone, the median referring domain stops linking after about 1,080 days, and 97.4% of those losses happened while the source page was still perfectly reachable. Nobody 404ed. The page was edited, redesigned or rebuilt and your link did not survive the process. A profile you stop feeding shrinks by default, and no amount of entity work replaces the pipeline.

Keep the quality bar. Nothing in this module makes a low-quality link worth having. Trust Flow survival scales the same way it always did — TF 0 domains have a median link lifespan of 859 days against 3,353 for TF 61+, roughly four times. Good links last longer, which is one more reason the cheap ones are a false economy.

Do not buy the packages. The rebranding of link selling as “AI visibility optimization” is already underway. Same suppliers, same footprints, new deck. If a service promises to get you cited by named AI products, ask by what mechanism, and watch what happens.

Do not rewrite your site for machines. The properties that make content retrievable are largely the properties that make it good. Stripping the voice out of your writing to make it more chunk-friendly is a trade nobody asked you to make.

How to weigh this module, one last time

I have said this in every lesson and I will say it once more, because it is the most important sentence in the module.

Modules 1 through 8 describe how link building works. Module 9 argues about where it goes. The first eight are built on twenty-five years of watching what happens and a million-link dataset I can show you. This one is built on the mechanics of systems whose internals are not public, and on inference. I have tried to mark every place where I am inferring rather than reporting, and where the honest answer was that nobody knows yet, I have written that instead of filling the gap.

If I am wrong about the direction, the cost of following this advice is low: you will have fixed your entity data, reported your earned coverage more accurately, and tracked mentions alongside links. Those are good practices whatever happens next. If I am right, the teams that started tracking association three years early will have a body of evidence the rest of the market is only beginning to assemble.

That asymmetry is the actual argument. Not that links are finished — they are not — but that the second currency costs very little to start earning, and you cannot earn it retroactively.