Guide

Link Building Guide

Last updated

Link building is the practice of earning hyperlinks from other sites to your own. A link from a relevant, authoritative site signals editorial endorsement and passes equity that helps the linked page rank.

How much weight that carries is worth settling before you budget for it, because Google’s own position has moved. Gary Illyes told PubCon in 2023 that links had not been a top-three ranking factor for some time and that people overestimate their importance, and at a conference the following April he went further: “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”1 Google speaks for Google, and it has an obvious interest in discouraging link acquisition, so practitioners competing on commercial queries frequently read their own data differently. Both readings can stand at once. Links are still worth earning, and a campaign priced on the assumption that they are Google’s heaviest signal is priced wrong.

This guide covers the full process from audit to measurement. Individual topics are covered in depth across the Link building, Link prospecting and outreach, Digital PR, Anchor text, Brand mentions, and Backlink audit and disavow articles.

Before building new links, understand what you currently have. An audit reveals the quality, distribution, and health of your existing backlink profile.

Export your backlink data. Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz maintain their own link indexes. Run a backlink report for your domain and export the full list of referring domains, not just total link count.

Identify your strongest links. Filter by domain rating and note which publications, industries, and content types have linked to you. This shows what has earned links historically and which relationships might produce more.

Expect to take no action on the low-quality end. Links from link farms, scraper sites and private blog networks sit in most profiles, and for the large majority of sites the correct response is to leave them alone. Google’s stated aim is to “nullify these unnatural links at scale”, with the result that “ranking may change as spammy links are neutralized and any credit passed by these unnatural links are lost”.2 The link stops counting; the site is not demoted for having received it. Third-party “toxicity” scores do not change that reading, and Google’s advice is to disavow only where you have a considerable number of spammy links and they have caused or will likely cause a manual action. See backlink audit and disavow for the two-part test and the narrow cases that meet it.

Compare against competitors. Run the same audit on two to three competitors who outrank you for priority keywords. The domains linking to them but not to you are your most actionable prospect list: they have already demonstrated relevance to your space and a willingness to link.

A useful goal is specific: a target number of new referring domains over a defined period, from defined source types.

Prioritise quality over quantity. Five links from established, relevant publications outperform fifty links from directories and low-authority blogs. Set a minimum quality threshold (domain rating, or publication type) alongside any volume target.

Treat tool scores as sorting aids, not targets. Domain Rating (Ahrefs), Domain Authority (Moz) and Authority Score (Semrush) are each calculated from that tool’s own index. Mueller has stated the position plainly: “No, Google does not use scores from third-party SEO tools or services. It doesn’t matter whether it’s about a website’s authority or a rating about spamminess, Google doesn’t use these scores at all.”3 They are useful for comparing domains within a niche and for filtering a prospect list quickly. “Reach DR 50” is not a goal, because the score is a lagging indicator of the coverage that produces it. See domain authority explained.

Identify which pages need links. Links to your homepage strengthen the domain’s link profile broadly. Links directly to target pages (product pages, key content, category pages) build those pages’ ability to rank for their specific queries. Identify which pages most need equity and direct outreach at them.

Calibrate to your current position. A new site with a thin link profile needs to establish a baseline of citations from relevant directories and niche publications before pursuing major editorial placements. A more established site can focus on high-authority acquisition. Match the strategy to your current domain profile.

Step 3: Choose your acquisition strategy

Different tactics suit different content types, domains, and relationship stages. Most successful campaigns combine more than one.

Content-led acquisition. The most durable links come from content others want to reference: original research, industry surveys, data studies, and comprehensive reference resources. This requires upfront investment but creates compounding assets: a page published years ago continues to earn links.

Digital PR. Pitching original data, stories, or expert commentary to journalists earns editorial links from news and media domains. The placements are among the most valuable available. Requires original angles and genuine news value: a product announcement without a hook does not earn coverage. See digital PR for the pitch process.

Broken link building. Identifying broken outbound links on relevant sites and proposing your content as a replacement. Works at scale with Ahrefs’ broken link checker or Screaming Frog. The value proposition is clear: you solve a problem for the site owner rather than simply asking for a favour.

Unlinked brand mentions. Sites that mention your brand without linking to you have already validated relevance. Converting the mention into a link is an easier ask than cold outreach. Ahrefs Alerts and Google Alerts surface new mentions. Conversion rates are higher because the relationship is already established.

Competitor backlink acquisition. Identifying the domains that link to competitors and proposing a reason for them to link to you as well. These prospects have demonstrated interest in the topic area and a willingness to link.

Journalist monitoring. Responding to reporters seeking expert sources earns editorial links from press publications, which are among the most authoritative available. Note that the best-known service no longer exists: Cision discontinued Connectively, formerly HARO, on 9 December 2024.4 Qwoted, Source of Sources and Featured are the current equivalents. Volume is limited, because queries specific enough to suit your expertise are rare and journalists select sources within hours.

Weight coverage over placements if AI visibility matters. The two goals pull in the same direction but not with the same force. Ahrefs’ December 2025 study of 75,000 brands put branded web mentions at a strong 0.656 to 0.709 Spearman against AI visibility, well ahead of Domain Rating at a weak 0.266 to 0.326.5 These are Spearman coefficients, where 1 would mean the two rankings match exactly and 0 no relationship at all. Semrush’s October 2025 study of 1,000 domains found nofollow links correlating with AI mentions almost identically to followed ones, 0.509 against 0.504 Spearman.6 If passed authority were the mechanism, followed links should pull clearly ahead. Both are correlations, and the authors caution against reading causation into them. The implication is narrower and reasonably safe: digital PR and content-led acquisition earn the mention and the link together, whereas tactics that place a link without producing coverage serve only the ranking side.

Google defines link spam as “the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings”, and its policy names the specific arrangements.7 The ones that catch legitimate campaigns most often:

  • Paid links. “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes” covers monetary exchanges, “goods/services trades, and product-seeding arrangements”. Sending free product in exchange for a followed link is a paid link.
  • Advertorials. “Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit.”
  • Excessive exchanges. “Link to me and I’ll link to you”, or partner pages that exist for cross-linking. Occasional reciprocal links between genuinely related sites are normal.
  • Low-quality directory links and “keyword-rich, hidden, or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites”.
  • Guest posting at scale with optimised anchors, where the article exists to carry the link rather than to serve the host’s readers. See guest posting for where the line sits.

Paying for placement is not itself prohibited. Passing ranking credit through it is: “It’s not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value to the <a> tag.”7 Google prefers sponsored for advertisements and paid placements, and treats these attributes as hints, so links carrying them “will generally not be followed”.8

The consequence is usually quieter than a penalty. SpamBrain nullifies the link and the credit is lost, which means a bought link stops working rather than triggering a demotion.2 Manual actions are a separate and rarer outcome reserved for the clearest cases, and those do suppress. Budget accordingly: the risk is mostly that you paid for nothing.

Step 4: Research and qualify prospects

Not every link opportunity is worth pursuing. Qualifying prospects before outreach saves time and improves conversion rates.

A qualified prospect has:

  • Topical relevance. The linking page or domain covers topics related to your content. An unrelated domain adds minimal topical relevance signal.
  • Sufficient authority. Set a minimum domain rating appropriate to your goals: for most sites, 30+ is a common baseline; for competitive niches, 50+. These are prospecting conventions for keeping a list manageable, not thresholds Google recognises. Relevance beats the score where the two conflict.
  • Editorial links on site. A site that links only to its own content or paid partners rarely links editorially. Check existing outbound links before adding it to your list.
  • A working contact. Bad email addresses waste more time in outreach than any other single cause. Verify contact information via Hunter.io or by checking the site’s contact and author pages directly.

Build your prospect list before writing a single email. Prospect research quality is what separates campaigns with 5% conversion rates from those with under 1%.

Step 5: Write personalised outreach

Outreach email quality has the largest effect on response rate. Generic templates sent without personalisation consistently underperform specific, personal emails that demonstrate you have read the site and have a relevant value proposition.

Keep it short. Three to four sentences is sufficient: who you are, why you are emailing this specific person, what you are proposing, and why it is relevant to their audience.

Lead with value. A good outreach email explains what the recipient gets from the exchange, not what you want. A broken link fix, a piece of relevant data their audience would find useful, a content gap you can fill: these are value propositions. “I noticed you hadn’t linked to us” is not.

Personalise beyond the first name. Reference a specific article on their site, a specific angle in their recent content, or a specific connection between their editorial focus and your content. Backlinko’s analysis of 12 million outreach emails with Pitchbox found personalised message bodies raised response rates by 32.7% and personalised subject lines by 30.5%, against a baseline where only 8.5% of outreach emails get any reply at all.9 The study dates from 2019, so treat the percentages as an order of magnitude rather than a current benchmark: a third more replies on a small base, which is worth the effort without being transformative.

Use a clear subject line. Vague subject lines get deleted. “Your article on X: a broken link I spotted” or “Data point for your [topic] piece” are clear and specific enough to earn an open.

Send from a named individual. Outreach from hello@company.com performs consistently worse than outreach from a real person. Editors and site owners respond more readily to a named human asking than to a team alias.

Step 6: Follow up once

Follow-ups earn a substantial share of all replies, so a campaign that sends once is leaving results on the table. Backlinko’s outreach study found a single follow-up produced 65.8% more replies.9 That makes the follow-up a large minority of responses rather than most of them, which is the version usually quoted. Send one follow-up five to seven days after the first email if there is no response. Brief and direct: “Just checking whether my previous message reached you” is sufficient.

One follow-up is standard, and two is acceptable for high-priority prospects. The same study found that sending three or more messages produced the best raw response rate, but raw response rate is not the only cost: repeated chasing burns the relationship with a publication you may want to approach again, and heavy sequences damage sending reputation. Stopping at two trades a little conversion for both. Track outreach status (prospect, email date, follow-up date, outcome) so you stop chasing prospects who have already declined.

Track outreach in a spreadsheet or CRM: prospect domain, contact email, send date, follow-up date, and status (no response, positive, declined, link acquired). The pipeline view shows where effort is concentrated and prevents wasted re-contact.

Step 7: Measure results and adjust

Link building results take time to appear in rankings. Links must be crawled and indexed before they influence rankings, and ranking improvements typically emerge over weeks to months.

Track new referring domains, not link count. Referring domain growth correlates with sustained ranking improvement more consistently than total link count, which can grow while referring domain count stalls if most links come from the same few sources.

Monitor which content earns links without outreach. Some pages attract links passively. These are your most efficient link assets: identify them, improve them, and expand similar content. Promoting them harder increases passive acquisition.

Track mentions and citations alongside links. Where AI search matters to the business, referring domains are an incomplete measure. Unlinked brand mentions track AI visibility more closely than links do,5 so a campaign judged only on acquired links will undercount coverage that earned a mention without a hyperlink. AI visibility measurement covers the tooling; the point here is to record coverage as an outcome in its own right rather than a near miss.

Measure response rate and link acquisition rate by tactic. Broken link building may convert at 15%; guest post pitching at 3% in the same niche. Reallocate effort toward what works for your domain profile and content type. What works in one niche does not transfer uniformly to another.

Account for link decay. Links are removed, pages are deleted, and sites go offline. An annual backlink audit identifies lost referring domains and prioritises their recovery, whether through a redirect, content update, or outreach to the site owner. Broken link reclamation covers that recovery work in full, including the case where the link still exists and only your page has gone. Maintaining the quality of an existing link profile is part of ongoing link building, not a one-time task.

Footnotes

  1. Google: We Need Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important — Search Engine Roundtable, 22 April 2024. Illyes spoke at SERP Conf on 19 April 2024; Patrick Stox reported the quote and Illyes confirmed it in reply. The 2023 PubCon remarks are covered in Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important — Search Engine Journal. ↩

  2. December 2022 link spam update releasing for Google Search — Google Search Central Blog ↩ ↩2

  3. Google: Don’t worry about SEO tool scores — Search Engine Land, 16 August 2023. Mueller in an #AskGooglebot video. ↩

  4. Connectively has been discontinued — Cision ↩

  5. Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied) — Ahrefs. Spearman correlations, December 2025. The authors state that “correlation isn’t causation” and that improving these metrics will not automatically raise AI visibility. ↩ ↩2

  6. Do Backlinks Still Matter in AI Search? Insights from 1,000 Domains — Semrush, October 2025. 1,000 randomly selected domains across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Search, Gemini, AI Overviews and Perplexity. ↩

  7. Link spam — Google Search spam policies ↩ ↩2

  8. Qualify outbound links to Google — Google Search Central ↩

  9. We Analyzed 12 Million Outreach Emails. Here’s What We Learned — Backlinko. Conducted with Pitchbox; last updated April 2019. ↩ ↩2