Links between sites you own are worth almost nothing: what a seven-property link rollout actually bought me

I spent an afternoon last week putting my own name into the footers of seven properties. A new section with thirteen cards on my projects page. Four Elementor footers on a home & living brand's country shops, each one a single centred line reading "Marketing: Remco Livain". Two imprint pages. Two draft pull requests on small side projects. Everything verified live, every link clicked.

The honest verdict, now that it's done: the links themselves are worth almost nothing. I knew that before I started, because I'd been told so, and I went ahead anyway. What I got instead turned out to be more useful than what I was aiming at — and one twenty-minute stretch of the afternoon taught me more than the whole rollout.

What Google actually says about links you give yourself

Google's spam policies define link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings", and the examples include "excessive link exchanges" and "partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking". Read that honestly against what I did and you get a split answer.

A credit line on a shop whose marketing I genuinely run is editorially true. It is not a scheme, and nobody is going to be penalised for it. But it also isn't authority, because nothing about it is independent. Seven properties where I control the footer tell a search engine exactly one thing: one person controls seven footers. I vouched for myself, in seven places, and the only new information in the system was my own opinion of myself.

That's the part that doesn't show up in a link-building checklist. The value of a link is almost entirely a function of who had to agree to it. When the answer is "nobody", you haven't earned a signal — you've typed one.

The thing the exercise did buy

Here's where it got interesting. Going property by property forced me to notice that my own name, my canonical URL and my one-line description were inconsistent across every single one of them. Different spellings of the role. Two sites pointing at a non-canonical version of the domain. One structured-data block missing entirely.

Fixing that is worth real money, and it has nothing to do with link equity. Google's own Organization structured data documentation is blunt about why: the url property "helps Google uniquely identify your organization", and sameAs exists to point at "a page on another website with additional information about your organization". Those are disambiguation mechanics. They're how a machine decides that the person credited on a furniture shop's footer, the author of a blog, and the operator of a Swiss lead-gen site are one entity rather than three.

I'd run into the same class of problem when I audited every brand string in code during a domain migration, and again when I folded twenty thin FAQ pages into one hub. Both times the win came from making the estate legible, not from making it bigger. The link rollout was the wrong lever attached to the right machine.

As Jeff Bezos puts it in Invent and Wander: "The way you earn trust, the way you develop a reputation is by doing hard things well over and over and over."

You cannot shortcut that with markup. You can, however, make sure that when the trust does accumulate, it accumulates against one identity instead of scattering across five near-misses.

The twenty minutes my projects page had no links at all

Mid-afternoon I pushed the updated projects page to my blog through the Ghost Admin API, as HTML. The call returned a clean 200. Then I loaded the page and every toggle card on it had collapsed into plain running text, with every link inside those cards gone. Not the section I'd edited. The whole page.

Ghost's own documentation hints at the mechanism without quite warning you: when you send a body as HTML, "Ghost creates cards automatically". It isn't preserving your cards, it's re-deriving cards from markup — and anything the HTML importer doesn't recognise as a card becomes text, links and all. The fix was to wrap the original card markup in Ghost's own kg-card-begin: html / kg-card-end: html comments, which survives the round trip. The cards still open on the live site because the theme loads the card script on every page; in the editor they now show up as HTML cards.

Twenty minutes, on the one page whose entire job was to carry links. The lesson is one I keep relearning in different costumes: a successful API response is not a verified outcome, and a change applied is not a change that holds. Before any programmatic HTML edit on a Ghost page now, I check the page for toggle, video and button cards, and I test on a draft first. That rule cost me one page and a small amount of dignity to write down.

What I'd do with the same afternoon again

Two of the seven jobs were worth doing on their own merits, and neither is a link. The imprint credits are simply true and should be there. The client credit is the only one a stranger can act on, because a stranger can verify it — someone can look at a shop, see who runs its marketing, and go check whether that person's site says the same thing. That's not a backlink, it's a reference that happens to be a hyperlink.

The rest of the afternoon should have gone into the one property that could earn links from people I don't control: a directory that other businesses would have a reason to cite. That's slower, it doesn't produce a satisfying checklist, and it's the only version of this work that compounds. It's also the version where knowing the domain is the whole advantage — anyone can wire up footers, and increasingly anyone's AI assistant will offer to.

A link you can issue yourself is a business card. A link someone else gives you is a reference. I spent an afternoon printing business cards, and the useful part was noticing that they all had my name spelled differently.

Sources & further reading

External
Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google web search
Google Search Central — Organization structured data (url, sameAs)
Ghost docs — Card visibility and the Admin API
Ghost forum — Admin API: mobiledoc vs. lexical

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I folded twenty thin FAQ posts into one hub page
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The death of generic AI: why deep domain expertise is the only real leverage left