Is it good to build backlinks to the home page?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Zachary Toto: Generally, your homepage should be optimized like any other page.
  
  
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  Trenton Erker: Zachary Toto If they’re asking this question, they’re probably not going to understand this. Maybe unpacking this would be helpful.
  
  
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  Trenton Erker: Ideally, building links to specific pages is best, but building links to a page can help all other pages connected to it. That’s called link equity (or link juice). Pages pass on link equity to other pages, so the more links a page has the more equity it passes to others that it is linking to.
  
  So building links to the home page could potentially help all pages that the home page links to.
  
  There’s no set number backlinks per day.
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: "Building backlinks" is a high-risk strategy. If you`re not even sure of how natural backlink profiles look, you`re probably not ready to take on the risk of incurring a manual action for violating search engine guidelines.
  
  Do you have any content that earns links? If so, can you make more of that content? Even if it`s not where your conversions take place, those kinds of pages distribute inbound PageRank to the rest of your site through their navigation.
  
  
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  Mark Seah: Michael Martinez but seo agencies always create content, n then buy backlinks gradually (not necessarily spammy) for clients or even sell links by DR value etc? that`s why somehow i feel this "loophole" is hard for google to cover.
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: Mark Seah Not all SEO agencies do that. And it`s against search engine guidelines regardless of who does it or how many people do it.
  
  When it comes to advising people who are clearly not very experienced, I caution them against buying links.
  
  Google issued 4 million manual actions (penalties) in 2019 (the most recent year for which I know they have confirmed). Most of those penalties were for buying links.
  
  
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  Mark Seah: Michael Martinez coz i noe seo agencies also use those media outreach agencies, who will then pitch articles to websites like yahoo n many others that look reputable. or sometimes ppl pay a fixed monthly or yearly fee to be listed on a website like maybe chamber of commerce, institute of small business and what not. how would google penalise such actions? i dont think they can?
  
  not a good practice of coz...but while google can penalise buying, it doesnt seem possible all the time i believe, n they even gave credit for those "backlinks"! for ranking.
  
  
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  Casey White: Mark Seah Auto agencies do this all the time with coupon sites. The thing is that strategy is outdated and doesn`t work like it used too. Google has the ability to recognize when companies pay for backlinks, the line is blurred when it comes to sponsorships of non-profits (501c3) though. Even though I have seen penalties for sponsorship backlinks too.
  
  The thing is sometimes there is a means to an end. I had one competitor site that bought a bunch of local non-profit links, performance of those links were a hit and miss. But the real gold was local news agencies wrote that this competitor sponsored local non-profits, and those backlinks did great. In the end their shaky strategy led to a decent outcome with natural links.
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: Mark Seah It`s a gamble. It`s always a gamble and anyone who thinks that buying links either directly or indirectly is a safe, Google-deceiving practice is only deceiving themselves.
  
  No one should ever tell people that this is a safe practice or the best way to do SEO.
  
  I agree that it`s the preferred method for highly competitive agencies. And many of them have walked away from clients who were penalized. I know that because I`ve helped clean up their messes.
  
  
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  Casey White: Ideally you want natural backlinks, but you can also strategize backlinks to the type of content you have. Backlinks are not a numbers game anymore. Let`s say you have a medical website and created a page on nutrition, and a nutrition blogger decides to backlink your site. Then it might be best to have them backlink to the nutrition page where that content is relevant. Google core updates have been focused on three things primarily: Spam, relevance, and local. When your making decisions think strategically about those three areas.So if there are specific pages you want to rank, ideally you want backlinks that have topical (or geographical) relevance to your specific page.
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: Regarding "building backlinks": You`re always allowed to ASK for links. That is link building.
  
  It`s best to leave the link anchor text up to the person who creates the link. You may be sorely tempted to ask for specific anchor text, but that`s essentially one of the signals search engines use to determine that a site is acquiring links unnaturally.
  
  You can study natural linking patterns by finding low volume queries outside of commercial topics - that is, topics that are hard to monetize.
  
  You`ll find the vast majority of Websites don`t earn many links.
  
  You`ll find that people rarely link with phrases like "best shoe reviews 2021" or "where to buy the cheapest tires".
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: SEO tools cannot tell you:
  
  1. Which links pass value in search indexes.2. How much traffic other sites get.3. Whether other sites are penalized.
  
  I am closing comments on this discussion to prevent further promotions of spam techniques that carry high risks. Such discussions are inappropriate for this group and they are bad advice to give to people with little or no experience who are just learning about search engine optimization.