Why this page exists

Link acquisition is the single largest source of risk in any SEO engagement, and it's the part clients understand least. A firm can hire an agency, watch rankings climb for two quarters, and then lose the majority of its organic visibility in a week — not because anything on the site changed, but because the link profile the agency built was bought from a network Google eventually classified and discounted. Unwinding that takes disavows, outreach for removals, and quarters of waiting. Some domains never fully recover.

Architecture makes this worse in a specific way. The AEC space has a dense ecosystem of directories, award listings, and design publications, and a large share of them sell placement. The line between a legitimate industry directory and a paid link farm is genuinely blurry here, and an agency without a written rule will drift across it under ranking pressure. So we wrote the rule down.

What we pursue

Editorial placements in design and building publications

Coverage of your projects, commentary from your principals, and contributed pieces in architecture, construction, interiors, and regional business press — earned by pitching something a publication actually wants to run. These take longer than a purchased link and they are the ones that hold value through algorithm changes.

Legitimate industry profiles and citations

Houzz, ArchDaily, Architizer, AIA chapter directories, professional association memberships you actually hold, and the local citation set that supports Map Pack visibility. These are claimed and completed accurately — the value is in consistency of name, address, and phone across the set, not in volume.

Genuine relationship links

Contractors, developers, engineers, interior designers, photographers, and product manufacturers you've actually worked with. Project pages, "designed by" credits, and partner listings. This is the most underused authority source in architecture and the one most agencies never touch, because it requires knowing your project history rather than running an outreach template.

Awards, competitions, and speaking

Submissions to awards you're eligible for and coverage of wins. We will not fabricate eligibility or submit on your behalf without approval, and we will not represent a paid listing as an award.

What we refuse

• Private blog networks and any link inventory sold by the batch.
• Paid links passing PageRank without disclosure or a nofollow/sponsored attribute.
• Automated comment, forum, profile, or directory blasting.
• Expired-domain acquisition for the purpose of redirecting authority.
• Reciprocal link schemes and three-way exchange arrangements.
• Hidden links, doorway pages, cloaking, or content served differently to crawlers than to visitors.
• AI-generated bulk content published on third-party sites purely to host a link.
• Negative SEO of any kind directed at a competing firm.
• Fabricated awards, invented credentials, fake certifications, or reviews we wrote ourselves.

On paid placement, honestly

Some legitimate design publications charge for sponsored features, and some industry directories charge a membership fee that includes a listing. These are not automatically off-limits — a directory fee for a real professional association is a normal cost of practice. Our rule is about attribution: where a placement is paid, it carries the appropriate rel attribute, and we do not count it as an earned editorial link in your reporting. If a publication requires that a paid feature be presented as editorial, we decline it and tell you why.

Content standards for placements

Anything published under your firm's name is reviewed by you before it goes live. We do not attribute opinions to your principals that they haven't approved, publish project details you haven't cleared, or make claims about licensure, certifications, or professional standing that we haven't verified with you directly. Where a piece is written by us on your behalf, you see it first. Where a publication requires author verification, we route it to you rather than inventing a byline.

Inherited link profiles

If you're coming from a previous agency, the first thing we audit is what they built. Where we find toxic or purchased links, we tell you plainly, prioritize removal requests, and use disavow only where removal fails — disavow is a blunt instrument and over-application causes its own damage. We won't pretend an inherited profile is clean to make the first ninety days look better than they are.

Reporting

Every link earned during an engagement appears in your monthly report with the source URL, the placement type, whether it was paid or editorial, and its attribute. You can verify every one. If we can't show you where a link came from, it isn't one we built.

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