Latest update: August 28, 2025
New to link-building?
In this guide, I share everything you need to know when you’re starting your link-building journey.
Contents:
- Chapter 1: Link Building Basics
- Chapter 2: How to Build Links
- Chapter 3: Link Building Methods
- Chapter 4: The Dark Side of Link Building
- Chapter 5: Link Building Across Industries
- Chapter 6: Further Learning
Chapter 1: Link Building Basics
Let’s start with the link building fundamentals. You will learn what link building is and why it’s important.
What is link-building?
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to improve SEO performance.
In practice, it means one of four things:
- Earning links organically. That’s when you create high-quality content, and people link to it to offer more value to their readers.
- Contacting bloggers and editors, sharing your content, and asking them to add links to your pages.
- Adding links by posting them on forums, Q&A websites, or social media.
- Buying links by paying the website owners directly for the placements. In the 2025 survey conducted by link building company Editorial.Link, 91.8% of respondents said they believe competitors buy links despite search engine rules (details later).
Why are backlinks important?
Backlinks are vital for SEO performance for three main reasons.
Higher organic rankings
Google uses backlinks, also called external or inbound links, to decide how to rank content in search results.
Backlinks help it:
- Discover your pages and understand what they’re about.
- Determine how authoritative and trustworthy the website is. If reputable websites link to your content, it makes it more credible.
Google employees have stated on a few occasions that links are becoming less important as a ranking factor, and the recent Ahrefs study has found that this is the case, but they still matter a lot.
Don’t get me wrong:
It’s possible to rank without backlinks in some situations, for example, for very long-tail keywords. But in highly competitive niches, like SaaS or legal services, they’re essential.
Improved brand awareness and referral traffic
Links from reputable websites, like news outlets or influential blogs, increase your brand awareness and strengthen your credibility in the eyes of your target audience.
They also bring referral traffic to your website.
That’s why link building is much more than a part of on-page SEO. It’s a digital marketing strategy in its own right.
Increased visibility in AI search
More and more people use AI chatbots and overviews to get answers to simple informational queries.
So, even if your content ranks high, it may not get the organic traffic it used to.
The good news is that AI-based search engines will still consider factors like domain authority and trustworthiness, but getting featured will be harder than ranking in SERPs.
Making powerful links even more important.
Why do you need to build links?
As mentioned, you could technically acquire links organically—without soliciting them from other websites. And lots of pages do.
However, that’s usually not enough to outperform your organic competitors. Especially if you’re only starting and your content doesn’t rank high.
So you need to build them actively.
Chapter 2: How to Build Links
In this chapter, you learn what link building involves and how you can evaluate backlink quality.
Link building process
Most link-building campaigns follow a similar process.
- Conduct a link profile audit. Analyzing your current backlink profile helps you identify unexplored opportunities and weaknesses to address. And set specific goals.
- Develop a link-building plan outlining which pages you will build links for and what tactics you will use.
- Find and vet link prospects. You can identify pages to target by analyzing your competitors and researching niche websites. Filter out websites with poor metrics or those lacking relevance.
- Create link-worthy content. Website owners won’t link to subpar content that adds no value and could undermine their reputation.
- Conduct link-building outreach. Contact prospective partners, share your content, and ask for links.
- Track results. Monitor the acquired links and their impact on your website performance.
Link building metrics
What metrics should you use for auditing your backlink profile, vetting prospects, and analyzing campaign performance?
Here are the top metrics commonly used by SEOs to evaluate backlink quality.
Domain authority
The higher the website authority, the more it helps you rank. Or in other words, it passes more called link juice.
SEO tools use proprietary metrics to measure authority: Moz has Domain Authority (DA), Ahrefs – Domain Rating (DR), and Semrush — Authority Score (AS).
Last year, the API leak revealed that Google has its authority metric, too.
How they calculate them varies, but they all consider the number and quality of the backlinks.
Dofollow/nofollow link ratio
Dofollow and nofollow are link attributes that help Google interpret the link importance.
Rel=”nofollow” means that the owner doesn’t directly endorse the linked website.
Traditionally, Google didn’t take these links into account when ranking pages.
This has changed now, and they can bring valuable referral traffic to your website, but generally, dofollow links are considered more precious.
You want 70-90% of your links to be dofollow.
Referring domains & backlinks
Referring domains are the unique websites that link to yours.
One website can link to your website multiple times, but the value of these links gradually decreases.
So, ideally, you want the ratio of backlinks to the referring domains to be as close to 1:1.
Outbound links
Outbound links are links to another website.
An unnaturally high number of outbound backlinks (or the outbound-inbound link ratio) may indicate that it sells links or is part of a PBN (more about it in a moment).
Toxicity score
Toxicity Score (TS) is a Semrush metric that assesses how harmful a link can be to your website.
Essentially, toxic links bring no value and can even hurt its performance, for example, by triggering a search engine penalty.
High TS doesn’t necessarily mean the website is bad, so use it in the context of other metrics.
Indexing
A search engine index is a database of all web pages.For a link to be of any value, the linking web page needs to be indexed.
Relevancy
SEOs who responded to the 2024 survey by Editorial.Link highlighted relevancy as the top factor for link value.
To benefit your website rankings, a link must come from a topically relevant website that targets a relevant audience and has a relevant anchor text.
Anchor text
An anchor text is the clickable text which opens the link.
Anchor texts help search engines understand the topic of the linked page, so they should be descriptive and relevant.
However, stuffing a text with keyword-rich anchor texts is a red flag. Search engines can see it as an attempt to manipulate rankings.
Link velocity
Link velocity is how quickly you build links.
Websites that acquire links too quickly might be suspicious because there’s a chance they use unethical tactics, like buying links, or don’t vet them properly.
Chapter 3: Link Building Methods
To create a natural backlink profile, use various various link-building strategies.
Editorial links
Editorial links, also called link insertions or niche edits, are when the author or editor adds a link to your page, for example, to provide more information outside the article’s scope.
Just like we’re doing with the internal links to our blog in this guide.
This usually happens before the article is published. However, you can also contact them after publication and ask for a link to your content.
Link exchanges
A link exchange is when you link to somebody’s page, and they link to yours in return.
Google doesn’t like them because of their transactional nature: you don’t link to somebody because they offer quality content, but because they link to you.
To avoid detection, SEO professionals use ABC exchanges.
That’s when Page A links to Page B, and Page B links to Page C. Page C may be owned by Page A owner or their link-building partner, who reciprocates with a link in the future.
Digital PR link building
Digital PR relies on creating newsworthy stories and sharing them with journalists who cover similar topics.
Such links are valuable because media outlets tend to have high-authority websites and large audiences. So, they give you lots of link juice and online visibility.
Forum link-building
Forum link-building has seen a revival recently, thanks to Reddit prominence in SERPs.
While forum links are generally seen as low quality or even spammy, skillfully weaving your link into a relevant thread can increase your brand visibility.
Resource page link-building
Many websites, including high-authority educational or government organizations, have dedicated resource pages.
You get links from such resource pages by persuading their editors to include your content.
Guest posting
Guest posts are articles that you write for other websites.
They allow you to reach new audiences, and you’re usually allowed to add at least one link to the article.
Unlinked brand mentions
An unlinked brand mention is when somebody writes about your company, product—or you—without providing a link.
When asked, website owners may add a live link to your website.
Link baiting
Link baiting is an organic link acquisition strategy.
Instead of asking for links, you create high-quality linkable assets and wait for others to take the bait and link to them.
The best link-bait resources include:
- Research reports and stat roundups.
- Images, for example, infographics.
- Free tools
Event link-building
When you sponsor industry or local events, you can often secure links on the events’ websites and their media partners’ websites. Organizing them can give you media exposure.
This is normally part of a broader marketing strategy. It requires considerable resources, but the increased visibility often benefits your brand more than the backlinks.
HARO link-building
HARO used to be a service where journalists could ask experts for contributions to their articles. If your pitch was successful and you got featured in the article, you often got a juicy link.
Broken link-building
Broken links on a page hurt user experience. So, if you find them and suggest pages on your website as alternatives, the webmaster might link to them.
The technique is getting increasingly harder, and its ROI—lower.
Directory link-building
The idea behind directory link-building is simple: you get the links by listing your business in relevant directories.
Apart from giving you backlinks (which are usually nofollow), directory listings get your company in front of potential customers.
Social media link-building
You can secure social media links by adding them to your profile or embedding them in your posts or comments.
Such links don’t pass a lot of link equity (they are nofollow) but boost your visibility.
Skyscraper link-building
The Skyscraper technique was developed by an SEO legend, Brian Dean.
It follows a 3-step process:
- Identify content that gets lots of links but which you can improve.
- Create the best resource on the topic.
- Pitch your content to site owners as a replacement for the existing resources.
Crowdfunding link-building
This niche tactic involves donating to crowdfunding campaigns related to your industry.
Or you can run your own campaign. The added benefit of this is securing additional funds, for example, for new product development.
Chapter 5: The Dark Side of Link Building
In this chapter, you will learn about unethical link-building tactics and their consequences. I will also give you some tips on how to avoid them.
Black Hat Link Building
While link-building is generally beneficial, there are certain practices, called black-hat tactics, that can harm your SEO performance and damage your reputation.
Essentially, these strategies violate search engine rules to manipulate search results.
In some instances, they are highly unethical and even illegal.
These include:
- Buying links from link farms, poor quality websites that don’t bring any value and are used to deliver backlinks only.
- Building links via PBNs, private website networks created only as a source of links.
- Hacking websites and placing links without the owner’s permission.
- Cloaking (making the website “look” different to search engines to trick them into believing it meets their guidelines).
- Auto-generating spam links with tools like RankerX or GSA en masse.
- Using sitewide links (for example, those in the menu or website footer) to multiply their effect.
How Google fights link spam
Some of the above tactics used to be extremely effective.
However, their widespread use meant users weren’t getting the best search results. So, Google said enough was enough and started to crack down on these dodgy practices.
In 2012, it rolled out the Penguin core update and started penalizing websites that violate the rules, either through manual actions or algorithmic penalties. The result? Tanking rankings and even complete deindexing.
Since then, the algorithms have evolved and are even more accurate at detecting unnatural link patterns.
Big G has also changed its stance on penalties. The worst offenders still get them, but in most instances, Google simply ignores the links.
This means that if you’re using such tactics, you’re wasting resources on links that bring no benefits. And even if they do now, you may get hit by a sudden drop in rankings and traffic in the future.
How to avoid penalties
To avoid crossing Google and wasting your money, follow these practices:
- Use only white-hat link-building tactics and be careful with gray-hat ones like link exchanges.
- Don’t rely on one tactic to create a natural backlink profile and minimize the risk of algorithm updates.
- Outsource link-building to a reputable link-building services.
- Disavow toxic links, but only if you get hit with a manual penalty. Disavowing links just in case will most likely hit your rankings.
Chapter 6: Link Building Across Industries
The above link-building principles, processes, and methods are universal.
In this section, I will give you examples of unique challenges and opportunities that link-builders face across different industries.
- In SaaS, technology changes rapidly, which means you need to update your content constantly. The competition for the top spots in SERPs is tough, but you can often build links for free through exchanges.
- Startups have limited resources, which doesn’t allow them to challenge the dominance of established competitors. However, they can often emulate the playbooks that help big companies rise to the top without figuring it out themselves.
- Enterprise-level companies have the resources to orchestrate extensive link-building campaigns and keep disruptors at bay, but such campaigns are complex to coordinate.
- E-commerce websites have thousands of product pages, which change a lot, and they can’t build links to all of them, so they focus on category pages.
- The legal industry is highly competitive because of high CPC costs, so organic performance is vital. Fortunately, they have the $$$ to invest in links.
- Real estate is a challenging industry to be in. Even if you’re targeting a local market, you often compete against large nationwide chains.
- To rank locally, you don’t need as many links, but they must be super relevant to your location. Which may be difficult to find.
- In contrast, there’s no shortage of opportunities for international link-building campaigns. However, it often requires content localization, and you have to navigate complex cultural or business norms.
Chapter 7: How to Develop Your Link-Building Knowledge (and Skills)
Our guide gives you a general overview of link-building. By following the links in the text, you can gain more granular outcomes.
In this chapter, I will show you how you can expand your link-building knowledge beyond the basics.
Enrol in link-building courses
Link-building courses include not only the theory but also exercises that force you to apply the newly acquired knowledge. So they teach you practical skills.
Here are a few reputable providers to check out when looking for a course:
1. LinkedIn Learning offers free courses for its premium members.
2. Ahrefs Academy, Semrush Academy, and Moz Academy have a range of free beginner and advanced link-building courses. The added benefit is that they teach you how to use their SEO tools to complete common link-building tasks.
3. CXL offers premium marketing and link-building courses, including Become great at SEO link-building, led by Irina Nica, Senior Product Marketing Manager at SurveyMonkey.
Read best link-building books
SEO books offer you more in-depth insights into link-building principles.
Here are my top 5 picks:
- Ultimate Guide to Link Building: How to Build Website Authority, Increase Traffic and Search Ranking
by Garrett French & Eric Ward - THE ULTIMATE GUIDE OF BACKLINKS: Expert techniques of SEO Link Building by Nadjib Amari
- LINK BUILDING FOR SEO: The Definitive Guide (2020 Update) by Umair Ahmad
- Link Building Is Dead. Long Live Link Building! by Sage Lewis
- Link Juice: Understanding and Using Backlinks for Better Search Rankings by Mike Wood
Subscribe to influential YouTube link-building channels
YouTube is a goldmine of link-building knowledge. And not just knowledge — you also get detailed how-to tutorials that flatten the learning curve massively.
What are the best channels to subscribe to?
Here are my five top recommendations:
- Ahrefs
- Crawling Mondays by Aleyda Solís
- Brian Dean
- Semrush
- Nathan Gotch
Follow link-building experts on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an excellent source of current SEO and link-building knowledge.
- Irina Maltseva – Head of Growth at Aura and SEO consultant
- Fery Kaszoni – Search Intelligence founder and digital PR guru
- Andrew Holland – Director of SEO at JBH
- Bibi the Link-builder – SEO consultant
- Leigh McKenzie – Head of Growth at Backlinko
- Ben Goodey – Founder of Spicy Margerita and the How the F**K
- Amit Raj – The Links Guy
Test various link-building tools
We use a wide range of tools to research, create content, and automate as many aspects of the process as possible.
These include Ahrefs, Semrush, BuzzStream, GetProspect, Majestic, and of course, ChatGPT.
They are excellent tools, but they may not work for you or your company.
So, do your homework and try out as many of them as possible before you start embedding them in your processes. And commit to expensive subscription plans.
Final Words
Link-building is a vital part of search engine optimization.
On the surface, it’s straightforward: you contact webmasters, ask them to link to your website, and job done. Or create excellent content and people link to it without asking.
This used to work 10-15 years ago.
These days, the competition for links is higher than ever. Webmasters know the value of their links and usually expect something in return, and creating content that stands out and generates links organically has never been harder.
The consequence?
Orchestrating successful link-building campaigns requires expertise, experience, and industry relationships.
Which takes time to build.
That’s why outsourcing link-building to an agency gives you a better return on your investment when you’re starting your SEO journey.
