How to Get Backlinks That Search Engines Value

Getting backlinks means earning links from other websites that point to yours. The word “earning” matters here, because the tactics that still work in 2026 are the ones built around giving other sites a genuine reason to link, not the ones built around gaming a system that Google has spent years hardening against manipulation.

This article covers the methods that actually move rankings: the ones grounded in content quality, relationship logic, and a clear understanding of why any editor or webmaster would add a link to your page in the first place.

Why Most Backlink Advice Misses the Point

Spend an afternoon reading about link building and you’ll find two camps. The first treats it as a numbers game: build enough links, from enough domains, and rankings follow. The second treats it as a creative discipline, closer to PR than to technical SEO. The second camp is closer to right, but neither camp asks the question that actually matters: why would a credible website link to yours?

I’ve managed SEO programmes across more than 30 industries over two decades, and the pattern is consistent. Clients who invest in genuinely useful, well-researched content build sustainable link profiles. Clients who chase volume with low-effort outreach and thin pages spend money, see short-term movement, and then lose ground when Google updates its quality signals. The underlying logic hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how quickly Google identifies the difference.

Backlinks are, at their core, editorial endorsements. When a journalist links to your data, when a blogger cites your methodology, when an industry association references your report, those links carry weight because they reflect a human judgement that your content is worth pointing to. That’s the model to build around.

If you’re building this as part of a broader SEO programme, the full picture is covered in the Complete SEO Strategy hub, which connects link building to positioning, on-page signals, and content architecture.

What Makes a Backlink Worth Having?

Not all links are equal, and the gap between a valuable link and a worthless one is wider than most people realise. Three factors determine link quality in practice.

The first is domain authority, or more precisely, the trustworthiness and editorial standards of the linking site. A link from a publication that maintains editorial rigour, covers your industry with depth, and has its own strong backlink profile carries far more weight than a link from a directory that accepts any submission.

The second is topical relevance. A link to a financial services page from a personal finance blog is worth more than the same link from a cooking site with high domain authority. Google’s understanding of topical context has become significantly more sophisticated, and relevance is now a primary signal, not a secondary one.

The third is anchor text. The words used to link to your page carry meaning, and a natural anchor text profile includes a mix of branded terms, partial-match phrases, naked URLs, and generic terms like “read more” or “this article.” A profile where every link uses the same exact-match keyword phrase is an anomaly that looks like manipulation, because it usually is. Search Engine Journal has covered the risks of over-optimised anchor text in detail, and it’s worth reading if you’re auditing an existing link profile.

The Content-Led Approach: Building Assets Worth Linking To

The most reliable way to earn backlinks at scale is to create content that other sites want to reference. That sounds obvious, but most content strategies don’t actually build for this. They build for traffic or for conversion, without asking whether the content is the kind of thing a journalist, researcher, or blogger would cite.

Linkable assets tend to fall into a few categories. Original research and data are at the top. If you survey your customer base, analyse proprietary data, or compile industry statistics that don’t exist elsewhere, you’ve created something journalists and bloggers need. They can’t get it anywhere else, so they link to you as the source. I’ve seen this work consistently across sectors from retail to B2B software. A well-executed annual report or industry survey can generate dozens of natural links over twelve months with minimal ongoing outreach effort.

Comprehensive reference content works similarly. Pages that answer a question more thoroughly than anything else available, that include frameworks, worked examples, and clear structure, become default references in their niche. These aren’t content farms or keyword-stuffed pages. They’re genuinely the best available resource on a specific topic. That standard is harder to hit than it sounds, which is exactly why it works.

Free tools and calculators occupy a similar space. If you build something that saves people time or helps them make a decision, and you host it on your domain, it will attract links from people recommending it. The investment is higher, but so is the return. I’ve worked with clients in financial services who built simple mortgage calculators that became reference points on personal finance forums for years after launch.

Digital PR: The Method With the Best Risk-Adjusted Return

Digital PR is the discipline of generating press coverage that includes links back to your site. Done well, it’s the single most effective link-building method available to most marketing teams, because it generates links from publications that would never accept a paid placement or respond to cold outreach asking for a link.

The mechanics are straightforward. You identify a story angle, often built around original data or a surprising insight, and pitch it to journalists who cover that beat. If the story lands, you get coverage. If the coverage includes a link, you get a backlink from a publication with genuine editorial standards.

The discipline comes in the story selection. Journalists receive hundreds of pitches. The ones that work are genuinely newsworthy: they contain a surprising finding, they tap into a current conversation, or they give a journalist something they can write about in twenty minutes. The ones that fail are thinly disguised product announcements dressed up as research.

When I was at iProspect, we ran digital PR campaigns for clients across multiple sectors simultaneously. The campaigns that generated the strongest link profiles were always the ones where we’d done the work to make the story genuinely interesting, not just relevant. A finding that challenges a common assumption, a data point that’s counterintuitive, a trend that’s bigger than people realise: those are the angles that get picked up. A press release about a product feature is not a story.

The Semrush guide to getting backlinks covers digital PR alongside other link-building methods, and is worth reviewing for a broader perspective on the tactical landscape.

Broken Link Building: Underused and Underrated

Broken link building is one of the few outreach-based tactics where you’re genuinely helping the person you’re contacting, which is why the response rates are meaningfully better than cold link requests.

The process works like this. You identify pages in your niche that contain outbound links pointing to pages that no longer exist. You then reach out to the site owner, let them know about the broken link, and suggest your content as a replacement. Because you’re solving a problem for them rather than asking for a favour, the dynamic of the conversation is different.

Finding broken links at scale requires a tool. Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog all have functionality for this. The workflow is: identify high-authority pages in your niche, crawl their outbound links, identify 404s, check whether you have content that’s a credible replacement, and then reach out with a concise, specific email that explains the broken link and offers your page as an alternative.

The key constraint is that your replacement content has to be genuinely relevant. If the broken link was pointing to a research paper on customer retention and your replacement is a blog post about your product, the substitution doesn’t make sense and won’t be accepted. The tactic only works when the fit is real.

The Skyscraper Method: When It Works and When It Doesn’t

The skyscraper technique, popularised by Brian Dean at Backlinko, involves finding content that has attracted many backlinks, creating a significantly better version of that content, and then reaching out to the sites linking to the original to suggest they link to yours instead.

It works in theory and sometimes in practice. The issue is that “better” is harder to define than it sounds. More words is not better. More images is not better. Better means more useful, more accurate, more current, or more thorough in a way that a reader would actually notice. If your version is substantively superior, some percentage of site owners will update their links. If it’s marginally different, most won’t bother.

The other constraint is that the outreach component requires volume to generate meaningful results. Response rates on this kind of cold outreach are typically low, which means you need a large enough list of prospects to make the effort worthwhile. For most in-house teams with limited bandwidth, this is a resource allocation question as much as a tactical one.

Where the skyscraper method works best is in niches where the existing top-linked content is genuinely outdated or limited. If you find a page from 2018 that’s accumulated links but contains information that’s no longer accurate, and you can build a current, comprehensive replacement, the case you’re making to site owners is legitimate. You’re not just claiming to be better. You’re demonstrating it.

Guest Posting: Still Viable, Increasingly Scrutinised

Guest posting has a complicated reputation in SEO circles, and for good reason. At its worst, it’s a link scheme: low-quality articles placed on low-quality sites purely to manufacture backlinks. Google has been explicit about this being against its guidelines when the primary purpose is link acquisition rather than audience value.

At its best, guest posting is legitimate content marketing. You write a useful article for a publication that reaches your target audience, you include a contextual link to relevant content on your site, and both the host publication and its readers get value from the arrangement. That version of guest posting is fine, and it still generates real links from real sites.

The distinction Google is drawing is between editorial guest posts and paid link placements dressed up as editorial content. If you’re paying for placement, the link should be nofollow. If you’re writing genuinely useful content for a publication that has editorial standards and a real audience, a followed link is appropriate.

In practice, focus on publications where you’d want to be featured regardless of the link. If the publication reaches your target audience, has a genuine readership, and maintains editorial standards, the link is a byproduct of a good content marketing decision. If the only reason you’re placing the article is for the link, that’s a signal the placement probably isn’t worth much anyway.

Reclaiming Links You’ve Already Earned

Before investing heavily in new link acquisition, most sites have a meaningful opportunity in link reclamation. This covers three distinct scenarios.

The first is unlinked brand mentions. Sites that mention your brand, your products, or your content without linking to you. These are warm outreach opportunities because the site has already demonstrated awareness of and interest in what you do. A short, polite email asking them to add a link converts at a much higher rate than cold outreach.

The second is lost links. Pages that previously linked to you but no longer do, often because the linking page was updated, the link was removed, or the page was deleted. Tools like Ahrefs track lost links, and some of these are recoverable with a short outreach message.

The third is redirect chains. If you’ve migrated your site, changed URL structures, or merged domains, you may have links pointing to old URLs that now redirect through multiple hops before reaching the current page. Cleaning up redirect chains so that links point directly to the canonical URL recovers link equity that’s currently being diluted.

None of these require building new content or running outreach campaigns at scale. They’re maintenance tasks that recover value from work already done, and they’re consistently underutilised.

YouTube and Video as a Link Source

Video content generates backlinks in two ways. First, YouTube video descriptions can include links to your site, and while these are typically nofollow, they drive traffic and contribute to brand visibility in ways that support organic search indirectly. Second, and more significantly, videos that appear in Google search results create additional surface area for your brand, and the pages that embed your videos often link to your channel or your site.

The Semrush breakdown of YouTube backlinks covers the mechanics of how video links work in practice, and it’s a useful reference if you’re running a video content programme alongside your SEO work. Separately, Moz has documented how YouTube video results in SERPs have evolved, which is relevant context for understanding where video fits in a broader search strategy.

The broader point is that link building doesn’t happen exclusively through written content. Any format that gets embedded, shared, or referenced by other sites generates link signals. Interactive tools, data visualisations, video content, and even well-designed infographics (when the data is genuinely interesting) all create linking opportunities that pure text content doesn’t.

The Outreach Discipline That Separates Results From Activity

Most link-building outreach fails not because the content is bad but because the outreach itself is generic. A template email that could have been sent to anyone, offering a piece of content that could have been written by anyone, is easy to ignore. And most people do ignore it.

Effective outreach is specific. It references the exact page you’re reaching out about, explains why your content is relevant to that specific page’s audience, and makes the ask clear without being demanding. It’s short. It doesn’t oversell. It treats the recipient as someone with limited time and a low tolerance for marketing theatre.

I’ve reviewed outreach campaigns for clients over the years where the team was sending hundreds of emails a month and generating almost no links. The emails were technically correct but completely interchangeable. When we rebuilt the process around specificity, personalisation, and a genuine reason for each site to link, response rates improved substantially. Volume matters less than you’d think. Quality of targeting and quality of the ask matter more.

One practical framework: before sending any outreach email, ask whether the recipient would read it and think “yes, this is relevant to me and my audience.” If the honest answer is probably not, rewrite it or remove that prospect from the list. The discipline of that filter improves both your conversion rate and your reputation, because sites that receive irrelevant outreach remember it.

What Not to Do: Tactics That Create Risk Without Return

Link schemes are well documented in Google’s guidelines, and the penalties for running them are real. Private blog networks, paid links without nofollow tags, reciprocal link exchanges at scale, and mass article submissions to low-quality directories are all tactics that Google has been targeting for years. They work until they don’t, and when they stop working, they often take your rankings with them.

The commercial logic of black-hat link building has always been fragile. You’re building on a foundation that depends on Google not noticing, and Google’s ability to notice has improved significantly with every algorithm update. I’ve seen clients inherit link profiles from previous agencies that were doing exactly this, and the remediation work is expensive, slow, and demoralising. Disavowing toxic links, rebuilding a clean profile from scratch, and waiting for manual penalties to be lifted is a significantly worse use of budget than building a legitimate link profile from the start.

The other category of wasted effort is low-quality directory submissions. There are directories worth being listed in: industry-specific directories with genuine audiences, local business directories for local SEO, and authoritative niche directories that editors actually maintain. General-purpose web directories that exist solely to sell listings are not worth the time or the money, and the links they provide are ignored at best and harmful at worst.

Getting an SEO investment approved internally often requires demonstrating that you’re building something sustainable, not just chasing short-term ranking movement. Moz has a useful framework for making that internal case, which is worth reviewing if you’re trying to shift budget toward content-led link building and away from volume-based tactics.

Measuring What Actually Matters

Link building is one of the harder SEO activities to measure because the relationship between individual links and ranking changes is rarely direct or immediate. A single link from a high-authority domain can move rankings noticeably. A hundred links from low-authority domains might move nothing. And the timeline from link acquisition to ranking change can be weeks or months.

The metrics worth tracking are: the number of referring domains (not raw links, since multiple links from the same domain have diminishing returns), the authority distribution of those domains, the topical relevance of linking sites, and the anchor text distribution across your profile. These are leading indicators of link quality, not just volume.

The business metric that link building should in the end connect to is organic traffic, and specifically organic traffic to the pages you’re building links toward. If you’re building links to a commercial page and organic traffic to that page isn’t improving over a six-month window, either the links aren’t working as expected, the page has other issues, or the competitive landscape for those keywords is harder than the link strategy alone can address.

That last point matters. Link building is one variable in a ranking equation that includes content quality, technical SEO, page experience, and search intent alignment. The relationship between SEO and conversion rate optimisation is also worth understanding in this context, because driving traffic to pages that don’t convert is a resource allocation problem as much as an SEO one.

Backlink strategy doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s one component of a broader approach to search visibility, and the full framework for how these pieces connect is laid out in the Complete SEO Strategy hub. If you’re building links without a clear view of how they fit into your positioning and content strategy, you’re optimising a part without understanding the whole.

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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