Tiered link building
Tiered link building means building links to the pages that link to you, in layers, to pass more strength to your site. It's link spam.
Tiered link building means building links to the pages that link to you, in layers. The first tier is a set of links pointing at your site. The second tier is a larger set of weaker links pointing at the first tier, and sometimes there's a third pointing at the second. The idea is to pump strength through the layers until it reaches your site.
It's worth knowing about mainly so you can spot it. Agencies still sell it, and it can do real harm to the site it's meant to help.
How it works
The top tier is often guest posts or pages on sites the builder controls. The lower tiers are bulk links: forum profiles, comment spam, throwaway blogs, automated directory listings. Nobody reads these pages. They exist only to be counted by a search engine.
For example, an agency offers Kestrel Roasters "five strong links plus 500 tier-two links" for a fixed fee. The five posts look normal. The 500 links pointing at them come from machine-written pages in a dozen languages.
Why it's risky
Google's spam policies treat links made to manipulate rankings as link spam, whatever tier they're in. Google's systems are built to ignore links like these, and a site that relies on them can lose the rankings it gained, or face a manual action.
It does nothing for AI search either. AI platforms don't name you because of how many links point at a page. They name you because of what the pages they read say about you. Junk pages in the lower tiers won't be read for any real question.
In AnswerOrbit
We never recommend links you pay or trade for. Our recommendations point you to real pages where your competitors are named and you're not, and to directories, review sites and forum threads that the answers actually use. See Recommendations.