How to Build Backlinks That Search Engines Value

Building backlinks means earning links from other websites that point to yours, and those links remain one of the strongest signals search engines use to determine how much authority your pages carry. The word “earning” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The tactics that produce durable results look very different from the ones that fill spreadsheets quickly.

This article covers how to build backlinks in a way that holds up over time, which methods are worth your effort, and how to think about link quality rather than volume.

Why Backlinks Still Matter in 2025

Every few years, someone declares that backlinks are dead. They are not. They have become more nuanced, more contextual, and harder to game, but they remain a core ranking factor. Google has said publicly, repeatedly, that links are one of the top signals it uses to assess page quality.

What has changed is the bar for what counts as a useful link. When I was building SEO as a service line at the agency around 2005 and 2006, we could get meaningful movement from directory submissions and basic article syndication. That era is long gone. The sites ranking at the top of competitive SERPs today carry backlink profiles built from genuine editorial endorsements, not bulk acquisition.

The reason links still matter is structural. A link from one site to another is a vote of confidence that no algorithm has yet found a reliable way to replace. Machine learning can assess content quality, but it still uses the web’s link graph as a proxy for trust. That is unlikely to change fundamentally, even as AI-generated content floods the index and search behaviour shifts.

If you want to understand how links fit into the broader picture of SEO, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers all the components that work together, including technical foundations, content quality, and search intent alignment.

What Makes a Backlink Valuable?

Not all links carry the same weight. Before you build a single one, you need a clear model of what you are aiming for. There are four dimensions worth understanding.

Topical relevance. A link from a site that covers the same subject area as yours carries more signal than one from an unrelated domain, even if that domain has a higher authority score. A home builder getting a link from a construction trade publication beats a link from a generic business blog with ten times the traffic. The Ahrefs resource on SEO for home builders illustrates how niche relevance shapes link strategy in practice.

Domain authority. Links from established, trusted domains pass more authority. This is where metrics like Domain Rating from Ahrefs or Domain Authority from Moz become useful proxies, though they are proxies, not the actual signal. For a more complete picture of which link building metrics actually matter, Semrush has a solid breakdown worth reading before you start chasing numbers.

Placement context. A link embedded in the body of a well-written article carries more weight than one buried in a footer or a links page. Editorial links, where an author references your content because it adds value to their piece, are the gold standard.

Anchor text. The words used to link to your page matter, but this is also where people get themselves into trouble. Over-optimising anchor text with exact-match keywords at scale is a pattern search engines flag. Search Engine Journal has covered the risks of repeating the same keyword in all your backlinks in detail, and it is worth understanding before you run any outreach campaign.

The Tactics That Actually Produce Results

There are roughly a dozen widely cited link building tactics. Most of them work in theory. Fewer of them work consistently in practice. Here are the ones worth prioritising.

Create Content Worth Linking To

This sounds obvious to the point of being useless advice. It is not. Most content on the web is not worth linking to because it adds nothing to the conversation. It summarises what already exists, uses the same structure as every competing article, and gives readers no reason to cite it.

Content that earns links tends to do one of three things: it presents original data, it provides a reference resource that people return to, or it takes a position clearly enough that others want to respond to it.

When I was running the agency’s content team, we ran a study on our own client base comparing paid search performance across verticals. It was not a massive study, but it was ours, and it was specific. That piece earned links from three industry publications without a single outreach email. The lesson was not that original research always works. It was that specificity is the precondition for being cited.

Tools, calculators, and templates also attract links reliably because they solve a repeatable problem. A well-built ROI calculator for a specific industry will earn more links over three years than a hundred generic blog posts.

Digital PR and Newsjacking

Digital PR is link building with a journalist’s mindset. Instead of asking someone to link to your content, you create something genuinely newsworthy and pitch it to publications that cover your space.

This works best when the story is tied to something timely or counterintuitive. A data-led piece that challenges a common assumption in your industry, or a survey that surfaces something genuinely surprising about consumer behaviour, has a real chance of being picked up. A press release about your new product does not.

The challenge with digital PR is that it requires genuine editorial thinking, not marketing thinking. You have to ask what a journalist’s readers would find interesting, not what your marketing team wants to say. Those are often very different things. I have sat in enough client briefings to know that the instinct to make it about the brand is almost impossible to suppress, and it is also the reason most digital PR campaigns fail to earn a single link.

Broken Link Building

Broken link building involves finding pages on authoritative sites that link to content that no longer exists, creating a replacement for that content, and reaching out to the linking site to suggest your version.

It works because you are offering something genuinely useful: a fix to a broken user experience. The outreach has a clear value proposition rather than a vague ask.

The process is straightforward. Use Ahrefs or Semrush to find broken links on sites in your space. Filter for pages with meaningful referring domains. Create content that genuinely replaces what was lost. Then email the webmaster with a short, specific note explaining the broken link and offering your replacement.

Conversion rates are modest, typically somewhere between 5 and 15 percent depending on how relevant your replacement content is. But the links you earn tend to be editorially placed and contextually relevant, which makes them worth the effort.

Guest Posting Done Properly

Guest posting has a complicated reputation because it has been abused at scale. Agencies built entire link-building operations around churning out thin guest posts for low-quality sites, and Google responded accordingly. The tactic itself is not the problem. The execution usually is.

Guest posting works when you are writing for a publication your target audience actually reads, on a topic you can genuinely add to, and when the link back to your site is contextually earned rather than shoehorned in.

The filter I use is simple: would I be happy for this article to appear under my name with no link in it? If the answer is no, the article is not good enough and the link will not be worth much anyway. If the answer is yes, you are probably writing something that earns its place.

Target publications with real editorial standards, genuine readership, and content that is clearly written by humans with expertise. Avoid any site that publishes “write for us” pages with no editorial criteria beyond a minimum word count.

Resource Page Link Building

Many sites maintain resource pages: curated lists of useful tools, guides, or references for their audience. Getting your content listed on a relevant resource page is a clean, low-friction way to earn a contextual link.

The search operators for finding these are straightforward. Search for your topic plus phrases like “useful resources”, “recommended reading”, or “helpful links”. Filter the results for sites with genuine authority in your space.

Outreach for resource pages should be brief and specific. Explain what your content covers, why it would be useful to their audience, and where it would fit on their page. Do not send a template that reads like a template.

Unlinked Brand Mentions

If your brand has been around for any length of time, there are probably sites that have mentioned it without linking to you. These are among the easiest links to convert because the publisher has already demonstrated goodwill toward your brand.

Use a tool like Ahrefs or Google Alerts to monitor for brand mentions. When you find one that is unlinked, reach out and thank the author for the mention, then ask whether they would be willing to add a link. The conversion rate on these requests is higher than almost any other outreach type because you are not asking for something from scratch.

Podcast and Video Appearances

Appearing as a guest on podcasts or YouTube channels in your industry typically generates a link from the show notes or episode page. These links are often from sites with real audiences and genuine domain authority, and they come with the added benefit of brand exposure.

The SEO value of YouTube backlinks is worth understanding before you invest time here. The short version is that links from YouTube itself are nofollow, but links from podcast show notes on independent sites are often followed and carry real weight.

This tactic scales better than most people expect. A single podcast appearance can generate multiple links if the episode is syndicated across platforms or referenced in future content. And the barrier to entry is lower than most link building: you just need something worth saying.

How to Approach Outreach Without Wasting Everyone’s Time

Most link building outreach is terrible. I have been on the receiving end of it for years, and I have seen the templates that agencies send on behalf of clients. They are formulaic, impersonal, and transparent in their intent. They get ignored because they deserve to be ignored.

Good outreach has three qualities. It is specific, meaning you have clearly looked at the site you are contacting. It is relevant, meaning what you are offering genuinely fits their content. And it is brief, because editors and webmasters do not have time to read a pitch that takes two paragraphs to get to the point.

Personalisation matters, but it does not mean mentioning someone’s name three times and referencing one article they wrote. It means demonstrating that you understand their audience well enough to know why your content would be useful to them.

Follow-up is acceptable once. A single follow-up email sent five to seven days after the original is standard practice. A third email is harassment. Know the difference.

Setting Realistic Expectations and Measuring Progress

Link building is slow. That is not a flaw in the process; it is the nature of earning something rather than buying it. Anyone promising a hundred links in thirty days is either selling you something you do not want or something that will actively harm your rankings.

When I set up link building as a formal service at the agency, we built it around quarterly OKRs rather than monthly link counts. The metrics that mattered were the average domain rating of links earned, the topical relevance of referring domains, and the ratio of followed to nofollowed links. Volume was a secondary consideration.

Moz has a useful framework for setting link building OKRs that is worth reviewing if you are formalising this as a channel. The principle is the same one I applied: measure what indicates quality, not just what is easy to count.

Track your backlink profile monthly using Ahrefs, Semrush, or both. Monitor for lost links as well as gained ones. A link from a high-authority site that disappears because the page was deleted is worth investigating and potentially recovering. The Ahrefs webinar on backlinks and mentions in 2025 covers how to think about this in the current landscape.

Set a baseline, define what success looks like over a twelve-month period, and review it quarterly. Link building that is not measured against a goal tends to drift into activity for its own sake, which is exactly the kind of marketing theatre I have spent twenty years trying to avoid.

What to Avoid

Link schemes are tempting when organic progress feels slow. Private blog networks, paid link insertions, link exchanges, and mass directory submissions all still exist and are still being sold. Some of them produce short-term movement. Most of them produce long-term risk.

Google’s ability to detect unnatural link patterns has improved substantially over the past decade. The signals it looks for include sudden spikes in link acquisition, over-optimised anchor text distributions, links from sites with no real traffic, and patterns that suggest coordination rather than organic editorial behaviour.

The risk is not just a penalty. It is the cost of having to clean up a toxic link profile, which requires disavow work, outreach to remove links, and months of recovery time. I have seen businesses spend more on penalty recovery than they ever saved by cutting corners on link building. It is not a trade worth making.

Search behaviour and how people interact with search results also plays into how Google assesses the value of your pages over time. Search Engine Land’s piece on search behaviour as a building block of SEO is older but the underlying logic holds: links that drive no engagement signal less value than links that send real traffic.

Building a Sustainable Link Acquisition System

The businesses that build strong backlink profiles over time are not the ones running occasional link building campaigns. They are the ones that have made link acquisition a consistent, systematised part of their marketing operation.

That means having a content calendar that includes assets specifically designed to earn links, not just assets designed to rank. It means having a process for monitoring brand mentions and converting them. It means building relationships with editors and journalists in your space before you need something from them.

It also means accepting that some months you will earn three links and some months you will earn fifteen, and that the long-run average matters more than any individual month. Consistency compounds. A site that earns ten to twenty quality links per month for three years will have a backlink profile that is very difficult to compete with, not because of any single tactic, but because of the accumulated weight of sustained effort.

There is also a case for thinking about automation in your workflows. Not to automate the outreach itself, which tends to produce the kind of generic emails I described earlier, but to automate the monitoring, prospecting, and reporting that supports it. Moz has covered how AI tools can support SEO workflows in ways that free up time for the judgment-intensive parts of link building.

Backlinks are one piece of a larger SEO picture. If you are building links without the technical foundations in place or without content that satisfies search intent, you are working harder than you need to. The Complete SEO Strategy hub pulls all of these components together if you want a broader view of how they interact.

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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