Tier Building

Tier Building (or tiered link building) is a link building strategy that creates a hierarchical structure of backlinks organized in multiple layers (tiers) to amplify the link equity flowing to the target website (money site). In a typical three-tier structure: Tier 1 consists of high-quality links pointing directly to the money site (guest posts, editorial links, niche edits), Tier 2 consists of medium-quality links (web 2.0 blogs, social profiles) pointing to Tier 1 pages to boost their authority, and Tier 3 consists of mass-generated low-quality links (automated submissions, comment spam) pointing to Tier 2 pages. The theory is that the money site is protected from low-quality links because they never point to it directly, while still benefiting from the cumulative link equity that flows up through the tiers. In practice, Google's algorithms have become sophisticated enough to trace link equity through multiple tiers and identify artificial structures. The temporal correlation of link creation across tiers and the typical patterns of tiered structures are detectable signals. While some legitimate SEO strategies involve a natural version of tier building (creating content that attracts links, which in turn attracts more links), deliberately constructing artificial tier structures violates Google's guidelines.