Integrity, control 1 of 7

G-01 Earn links; do not manufacture ranking signals

P0Hard gateNeeds your evidence

Never buy, automate or exchange links primarily to manipulate rankings. A real partnership is not automatically a link scheme; purpose, placement and disclosure matter.

Priority: Gate. A FAIL stops publish or launch.
Hard gate: Yes. A FAIL stops publication, whatever the score.
Change class: APPROVAL_REQUIRED: Required exact authority must be valid before the consequential action.
Quality bucket: Not scored: hard gate only

Why it matters

Links built to manipulate rankings put the whole site at risk, because Google's spam policies treat them as spam. Search engines and AI answer engines then have less reason to trust the site, and the people who visit it get no real benefit from those links.

Evidence to review

Placement agreements, live link attributes, referring-page context and an ownership map.
Separate owned-network references from independent editorial endorsements.

How to implement

Inspect a representative link and anchor sample, paid placements and sitewide patterns.
Record the commercial relationship and editorial purpose before outreach.
Qualify paid and user-generated links appropriately; do not auto-disavow links merely because a vendor calls them toxic.
Treat common ownership as context, not proof of spam; review actual purpose and effects. Do not manufacture independent endorsements across sister sites.

How UltimateSEO checks this

Needs your evidence. No automated check covers this control, so it stays UNKNOWN until evidence is supplied.

Evidence needed: a sample of referring domains, anchor text distribution and link acquisition history; a crawl of your own site cannot see your backlink profile.

States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.

Myth guards that reference this control

Sources

[G4] Google spam policies

Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.