Backlink Building: What Moves Rankings

Backlink building is the process of earning links from other websites to your own, with the goal of improving your site’s authority and search engine rankings. Backlinks function as signals of trust: when a credible site links to yours, it tells Google that your content is worth referencing. The challenge is that most advice on how to build them is either outdated, impractical, or designed to sell you something.

I’ve been running SEO as a service line since the early 2000s. When I was building out the agency at iProspect, SEO was one of the disciplines we positioned as a high-margin, high-retention service, and backlink building was a significant part of what we sold. I’ve seen the full arc of how this practice has evolved, from directory submissions and article spinning to digital PR and content-led link acquisition. The fundamentals have not changed as much as the industry pretends.

Why Backlinks Still Matter in 2025

There is a recurring cycle in SEO commentary where someone declares that backlinks are dying, that content alone is enough, or that some new signal has replaced links entirely. It happens every couple of years. And every time, the data tells a different story.

Links remain one of the most reliable ranking signals Google uses. That is not a controversial claim. It is consistent with what Google’s own documentation says, what independent ranking factor analyses have shown over time, and what practitioners see when they run controlled experiments. The reason links matter is structural: Google’s original insight was that a link is a vote of confidence from one site to another. That logic has not been invalidated. It has been refined.

What has changed is how Google evaluates those votes. A link from a site that exists purely to pass links is worth nothing, and may actively harm you. A link from a genuinely authoritative, topically relevant site in an editorial context is worth a great deal. The gap between those two scenarios is where most of the confusion in backlink building lives.

If you want a grounding resource for how this fits into a broader search strategy, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers the full picture, including how links interact with on-page signals, technical foundations, and content quality.

What Makes a Backlink Worth Having

Not all links are equal, and the criteria for evaluating them have become more nuanced as Google’s algorithms have matured. There are four things I consistently look at when assessing whether a link is genuinely valuable.

Domain authority and relevance. A link from a high-authority domain in your industry is the gold standard. Authority without relevance is worth less than most people assume. A link from a major national newspaper to a niche B2B software company has some value, but a link from a respected industry publication in that software’s vertical is often more useful for the specific queries you’re trying to rank for.

Editorial context. Where the link sits on the page matters. A link embedded naturally within a piece of editorial content, where it genuinely adds value for the reader, carries more weight than a link in a footer, sidebar, or a list of sponsors. Google’s systems are reasonably good at identifying whether a link exists because an editor decided it was useful, or because someone paid for placement.

Anchor text. The text used to hyperlink to your site sends a signal about what your page is about. Using the same keyword in all your backlinks is a well-documented risk. A natural link profile includes branded anchors, generic anchors like “here” or “read more”, partial-match anchors, and some exact-match anchors. The ratio matters. If every link to your site uses the same optimised phrase, that is a footprint, and Google notices footprints.

Link placement longevity. A link that disappears three months after it goes live has limited value. When evaluating link-building campaigns, I always ask about retention rates. Agencies that build links through content partnerships and genuine editorial relationships tend to have much higher retention than those relying on outreach-at-scale to cold contacts.

The Backlink Strategies That Hold Up Over Time

There is a meaningful difference between tactics that work in the short term and strategies that compound over time. The former tend to involve shortcuts that carry risk. The latter tend to involve doing something genuinely useful and making sure the right people know about it.

Content-led link acquisition. The most durable approach to building links is creating content that other sites want to reference. This is not the same as writing blog posts and hoping for the best. It means identifying the specific gaps in your industry’s content landscape, building something that fills those gaps better than anything currently available, and then promoting it to the people who are most likely to link to it. Content-based link building takes longer to show results than outreach-led approaches, but the links it generates tend to be more authoritative and more stable.

When we were growing the agency, I pushed the team to build tools and data-driven reports rather than just producing editorial content. A well-constructed industry benchmark report, for example, gets cited repeatedly over several years. The initial investment is higher, but the return per link is significantly better than anything you can achieve through manual outreach.

Digital PR. Earning coverage in publications that have genuine editorial standards is one of the most effective ways to build authoritative links at scale. Digital PR done well involves identifying stories with news value, pitching them to journalists who cover relevant beats, and securing coverage that includes a link back to your site. Done badly, it is glorified press release distribution with no genuine story behind it.

The distinction matters commercially. Good digital PR campaigns can generate links from domains that would be impossible to reach through any other method. The challenge is that it requires creative thinking, media relationships, and an understanding of what journalists actually need, none of which can be automated cheaply.

Broken link building. This is one of the more underused tactics in the practitioner toolkit. The approach involves finding links on other sites that point to pages that no longer exist, identifying where your content could serve as a replacement, and reaching out to the site owner to suggest the swap. Moz’s research on link building has consistently highlighted broken link building as one of the higher-conversion outreach methods, because you are solving a genuine problem for the site owner rather than asking them to do you a favour.

Unlinked brand mentions. If your brand, product, or key personnel are mentioned in content that does not include a link back to your site, that is a recoverable situation. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can surface these mentions at scale. A polite, personalised outreach email to the author or editor, noting that they referenced your brand and asking if they would consider adding a link, converts reasonably well because you are not asking them to create something new. The mention already exists.

Guest contribution. Writing for other publications in your space remains a legitimate link-building method when done with genuine editorial intent. The operative word is genuine. A guest post that exists purely to drop a link into a piece of thin content is a different thing from a substantive contribution to a respected industry publication that happens to include a relevant link. Google has been clear about this distinction for years, and the quality signals that separate the two are not hard to identify.

Competitor Backlink Analysis: Where to Start

One of the most efficient things you can do before launching any link-building campaign is map where your competitors are getting their links from. This is not about copying their strategy. It is about understanding the landscape of what is available in your space before you invest time and budget in outreach.

Pull the backlink profiles of your top three to five competitors using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Look for patterns: which domains link to multiple competitors but not to you? Those are your priority targets, because the precedent for linking to businesses like yours already exists. A site that has linked to three of your competitors is far more likely to link to you than a site that has never covered your industry.

Also look for the content types that attract the most links in your space. Are they data reports? Tools? Opinion pieces from named experts? Long-form guides? The answer varies significantly by industry, and the answer tells you where to focus your content investment before you start outreach. The Ahrefs backlinks and mentions webinar covers this kind of competitive analysis in useful depth if you want a technical walkthrough.

I used this approach when we were repositioning the agency’s SEO offering. Before we committed to a content strategy, we mapped what was earning links for the agencies we were competing with. The answer was clear: proprietary data. Agencies that published original research were getting significantly more inbound links than those publishing opinion content. That insight shaped our content investment for the next two years.

What to Avoid and Why

The link-building space has always attracted shortcuts, and the shortcuts have always carried risk. Some of them have carried significant penalties. A few are worth naming directly.

Private blog networks. A PBN is a collection of websites built or purchased specifically to pass links to a target site. They can produce short-term ranking gains. They also carry a meaningful risk of a manual penalty, which can wipe out years of organic progress. I have seen this happen to clients who inherited PBN links from previous agencies. The recovery process is slow, expensive, and demoralising. It is not worth it.

Paid links without nofollow or sponsored tags. Paying for a link and presenting it as editorial is a violation of Google’s guidelines. This does not mean paid placements are universally problematic. Sponsored content, clearly labelled, with appropriate link attributes, is a legitimate commercial arrangement. The issue is when the paid nature of a link is concealed, because that is the specific thing Google’s link spam systems are designed to detect.

Mass outreach with templated emails. Sending five hundred identical outreach emails with a slightly personalised first line is not a link-building strategy. It is spam with a spreadsheet behind it. The conversion rates are low, the links that do come back tend to be low quality, and the volume of rejections can damage your sender reputation. Targeted, personalised outreach to a smaller number of genuinely relevant sites consistently outperforms mass campaigns.

Over-optimised anchor text. I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating because it is one of the most common mistakes I see in agency-delivered link-building reports. If a campaign is generating links with identical exact-match anchors, that is not a sign of precision. It is a sign of a footprint that Google’s systems will eventually flag. Anchor text should look like what naturally occurs when people link to things they find useful, which is varied, imprecise, and often branded.

How to Evaluate a Link-Building Campaign

If you are managing an agency or an in-house team delivering link building, the metrics you use to evaluate the work matter enormously. The wrong metrics create the wrong incentives, and the wrong incentives produce low-quality links dressed up as results.

Volume of links acquired is a vanity metric in isolation. What matters is the quality distribution of those links. A useful reporting framework looks at domain rating or domain authority of acquired links, topical relevance to your site, whether the links are editorial or paid, anchor text distribution across the full link profile, and whether the links are being retained over time.

Beyond the link metrics themselves, the commercial question is whether the campaign is contributing to ranking improvements on target queries and whether those ranking improvements are translating into traffic and conversion. Understanding backlinks in the context of broader SEO performance means connecting link acquisition activity to search visibility trends, not just counting links in a monthly report.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the consistent problems with entries in the performance and digital categories was the conflation of activity metrics with outcome metrics. Link building has exactly the same problem. The number of links built in a quarter is an activity metric. The change in organic visibility and revenue attributable to those links is an outcome metric. Most agencies report the former and hope clients do not ask too hard about the latter.

Building Links at Scale Without Losing Quality

There is a genuine tension in link building between quality and scale. The tactics that produce the best links, such as original research, digital PR, and relationship-based outreach, are time-intensive and difficult to systematise. The tactics that scale easily tend to produce lower-quality links. Managing this tension is the core operational challenge of any serious link-building programme.

One approach that works well is to separate the link-building activity into two tracks. The first track focuses on high-value, low-volume link acquisition through content and PR. This might generate ten to twenty strong links per quarter. The second track focuses on medium-value, higher-volume acquisition through tactics like broken link building, unlinked mention recovery, and resource page outreach. This can generate more links at a lower average quality, but the links are still legitimate and editorially placed.

The combination produces a link profile that looks natural and grows at a rate that correlates with genuine content investment, which is exactly what a healthy site’s link profile should look like.

For sites with a content production capability, video content can also generate backlinks in ways that text-only content cannot, particularly through embeds and citations in articles covering the same topic. It is worth considering as part of a broader content mix if the resource investment is available.

The Role of Internal Links in a Backlink Strategy

External backlinks get most of the attention, but internal links are the mechanism by which link equity is distributed across your site. If you are building strong links to your homepage or to a handful of high-profile pages, but those pages are not internally linking to the pages you actually want to rank, you are leaving value on the table.

A sensible link-building strategy maps the pages you want to rank, identifies which of those pages have the strongest existing link equity, and then ensures those pages are linking internally to the target pages with appropriate anchor text. This is not a substitute for external links, but it amplifies the value of the external links you do have.

It is also worth considering the role of long-tail content in a link-building strategy. Pages targeting long-tail keywords often attract highly specific, highly relevant links from niche sources that would never link to a broader page. Those links, while coming from smaller domains, tend to be topically precise in a way that supports ranking for the specific queries you care about.

Backlink building is one component of a broader SEO system. If you want to understand how it connects to technical foundations, content strategy, and competitive positioning, the Complete SEO Strategy hub is the right place to see how the pieces fit together.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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