Link Building

Link building is the practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving search engine visibility. Common link building strategies include content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building and public relations.

If you’re just starting out in SEO, figuring out link building can be quite a challenge.

Some SEOs will tell you to create great content and wait for links to come naturally, others will insist that strategic link prospecting and targeted email outreach is where it’s at, and someone else will give you a cryptic smile and drop just one word: PBNs.

So who should you listen to?

As with many things in SEO, the correct answer is: “it depends.” There’s no single right approach to link building and your choice of tactics will largely depend on your industry, your website, your resources, and your goals.

According to Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. So if you want your website’s pages to rank high in search, you will almost certainly need links.

Google (and other search engines) look at links from other sites as “votes.” These votes help them identify which page on a given topic (out of thousands of similar ones) deserves to be ranking at the very top of the search results.

From this introductory chapter it may seem that in order to rank #1 in Google, all you need to do is build more backlinks than the pages that are currently ranking there.

And while that is true to a certain extent, in reality things are a little more nuanced than that.

Other than all links not being equal (we’ll talk more about it in Chapter 3), search engines factor in many other variables when ranking pages. And the mix of these variables may actually depend on the type of search query that you want to rank for.

So if you build lots of links to your page and it still ranks poorly, don’t blame this guide for misleading you. Look into other ranking factors that might prevent you from ranking well.

1. Adding links

If you can go to a website that doesn’t belong to you and manually place your link there, that’s called “adding” a link. The most common tactics that fit into this category are:

• Business directory submissions;
• Social profile creation;
• Blog commenting;
• Posting to forums, communities & Q&A sites;
• Creating job search listings;
• etc.

Building links via those tactics is very easy to do. And for that exact reason, those links tend to have very low value in the eyes of Google (and in some cases can even be flagged as SPAM).

Other than that, these kinds of links barely give you any competitive advantage. If you can go to a website and manually place your link there, nothing stops your competitors from doing the same.

However, you shouldn’t ignore this group of link building tactics entirely. Each of them can actually be quite beneficial for your online business for reasons other than acquiring links.

Let me elaborate with a few examples:

Business directories

You should resist the urge to add your website to every single business directory there is just to get yourself another link. Instead, focus on those that are well known, have traffic and therefore might bring actual visitors to your website.

For example, if you’re a small business owner and you’ve learned about a local business directory where fellow entrepreneurs get their leads, you should absolutely list your business there. And that one link would probably bring you a lot more ‘SEO value’ than submitting your site to a list of generic business directories that you found at a random SEO forum.

Social profiles

It’s good practice to claim your brand name on all major social media sites (Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, Instagram & the like) as soon as possible. Otherwise, squatters might snatch them once your brand gets on their radar.

Investing some time and effort into relevant social media sites is a good way to amass a loyal following and promote your business to them. But the actual links from social profile pages have little to no direct SEO value unfortunately. So don’t expect a sudden ranking boost after signing up for a few dozen social networking sites.

Blog comments

Leaving a meaningful comment on someone’s article is a great way to get on their radar and kickstart a relationship with them (which might lead to all sorts of good things). But posting comments with the sole purpose of shoehorning a link to your website there will only make blog owners hate you.

And besides, links from blog comments are usually nofollowed (i.e., might not count as “votes”). So if you’re thinking of leaving someone a comment just to add your link there—don’t.

Hopefully these three examples will give you a good idea of how to “add” your links to other websites without being spammy.

2. Asking for links

As the name suggests, this is when you reach out to the owner of the website you want a link from and give them a compelling reason to link to you.

That “compelling reason” is absolutely essential for this group of link building tactics. The people you reach out to don’t care about you and your website (unless you’re some sort of celebrity) and thus they have zero incentive to help you out.

So before you ask them to link to you, ask yourself: “What’s in it for THEM?”

Here are some of the link-building tactics and strategies that fall into this category, along with a briefly defined “compelling reason” that they’re based off:

• Guest blogging. Create useful content for their website.
• Skyscraper technique. Show them a better resource than the one they’re linking to.
• Link inserts. Show them a resource with more information on something they’ve briefly mentioned.
• Ego bait. Mention them or their work in your own content in a positive light.
• Testimonials & Case studies. Give positive feedback about their product or service.
• Link exchanges. Offer to link back to them if they agree to link to you.
• Resource page link building. Show them a good resource that fits their existing list.
• Broken link building. Help them fix a “dead” link on their page.
• Image link building. Ask to get credit for using your image.
• Unlinked mentions. Ask to make the mention of your brand “clickable.”
• Link moves. Ask to make changes to an existing link.
• HARO & journalist requests. Give an “expert quote” for their article.
• PR. Give them a killer story to cover.

All these strategies seem quite exciting, right? But as soon as you send your first email request you’re likely to face the harsh reality—your “compelling reason” isn’t compelling enough:

• Your guest post isn’t good enough.
• Your resource isn’t unique enough.
• Your “Skyscraper” isn’t “high” enough.
• etc.

You see, for these link building tactics to be effective, you need to create a truly exceptional page that people would naturally want to link to. Or have a lot of authority and credibility in your space, which might help to compensate for your page’s lack of notoriety.

Given how hard it is to persuade random people to link to you, many SEOs started looking for ways to sweeten the deal:

• Offer to share their content on Twitter & Facebook.
• Offer to promote their content in an email newsletter.
• Offer free access to a premium product or service.
• Offer a link in exchange.
• Offer money.

But offering these kinds of “extra benefits” gets us into the grey area of what is considered a “link scheme” according to Google’s guidelines:

And there you have it. The legitimate ways of asking for links have a rather low success rate, but as soon as you try to “sweeten the deal,” you’re entering Google’s minefield.

At this point, it may seem that I’m dissuading you from using tactics and strategies listed in this group. I’m not. I’m just trying to set the right expectation so that you won’t give up after sending your 10th outreach email and getting no response. It really takes a lot of effort to get links with these tactics while not breaking Google’s guidelines.

3. Buying links

Let’s get this straight from the get-go: we don’t recommend that you buy links! 

At best, you’re likely to waste lots of money on bad links that will have zero impact on your rankings; at worst, you’ll get your website penalized.

However, we would be putting you at a disadvantage if we didn’t disclose the fact that many people in the SEO industry do “buy” links in all sorts of ways and manage to get away with it.

So if you’re willing to risk the well-being of your website and buy links – please look for advice on doing that “safely” elsewhere, because here at Ahrefs we don’t teach that.

4. Earning links

You “earn” links when other people link to the pages on your website without you having to ask them to do so. This obviously doesn’t happen unless you have something truly outstanding that other website owners would genuinely want to mention on their websites.

But people can’t link to things that they don’t know exist. So no matter how awesome your page is, you’ll need to invest in promoting it. And the more people see your page, the higher the chance that some of them will end up linking to it.

Here are a few tactics and strategies that fall into this category:

• Linkbait (or linkable assets). Data studies, infographics, maps, surveys, awards.
• Podcasts / interviews / expert roundups.
• Content promotion.
• etc.

Earning links is arguably the most effective way to get them.

I’d much prefer to invest my time and money into creating valuable pages that will generate word of mouth and pick up links naturally, rather than working on a sequence of daunting link prospecting and email outreach workflows hoping to build links to a mediocre page.

You might argue that it’s easy for Ahrefs to advocate earning links naturally with linkbait, given that we have:

• Lots of proprietary data, which we can use for publishing research studies.
• A team of skilled professionals, who can help us create valuable resources.
• A trusted brand, that automatically gives credibility to all our work.
• A fairly large audience to promote our content to (and kickstart word of mouth).

Yes, all these things DO make it a lot easier to earn links. But even if you’re only starting out, there are still ways to create noteworthy content on a tight budget and earn links organically. The “secret” is that you need to invest 10x more effort into your content compared to your competitors.