Every week someone offers to sell you 50 do-follow links from DA 60 sites for a fixed monthly fee. The offer is tempting because link building is genuinely hard & this looks like a shortcut. It is not a shortcut. It is a purchase of the exact footprint that link spam detection is designed to identify, on sites that exist only to sell links, sold to hundreds of other buyers.
The honest position is that links still matter a great deal, that earning them is slow, & that the slowness is precisely why they retain value. What follows are the methods that actually work, ordered by how reliably they produce results relative to effort.
Judge a link before you chase it
Most wasted outreach effort goes into links that would not have helped anyway. Before you build a prospect list, agree on what qualifies.
- Relevance beats authority metrics. A link from a modest site in your industry is worth more than one from a high-authority site with no topical connection. Third-party authority scores are useful for sorting a list, not for making the decision.
- Would a real person click it? If the link sits in a footer, a sidebar list of 200 partners, or a paragraph unrelated to the surrounding text, it is decorative.
- Does the site have an audience? Check whether it publishes for readers or for search engines. Sites accepting guest posts on any topic from any industry are in the second category.
- Is the link editorially given? Someone chose to link to you because your page was useful. That is the only category that reliably holds value through algorithm changes.
A useful filter: if the only reason the link exists is SEO, it is the kind of link most at risk of being discounted.
Build something worth linking to
Outreach fails most often because there is nothing on the other end worth mentioning. Before contacting anyone, ask what a journalist, blogger or association would gain by pointing readers at your page. A service page is not an answer.
Asset types that consistently earn links:
- Original data. You do not need a large research budget. A survey of your own customers, an analysis of your own anonymised operational data, or a structured review of publicly available information all produce something nobody else has. Original numbers are the most linkable thing on the internet.
- Genuinely definitive guides. Not a 1000-word overview of a topic covered adequately elsewhere. A resource that is clearly the most complete treatment available, ideally on a subject where existing coverage is poor or outdated.
- Free tools & calculators. A simple calculator that answers a real question people ask repeatedly will accumulate links for years with no further effort.
- Local & sectoral resources. A well-maintained list, map or directory relevant to a specific market. These earn links from exactly the local & industry sources that carry relevance.
Budget the asset creation properly. It is normal for the asset to cost more than the outreach, & that ratio is a sign you are doing it correctly.
Outreach that gets replies
Response rates are low by nature. They collapse entirely when the email is obviously templated.
Practical rules that lift replies:
- Contact a named person who has written about the topic recently. Generic inboxes are a last resort.
- Lead with what is useful to them, not with an introduction to your agency. The first sentence should make clear why you are contacting this specific person.
- Be short. Four sentences. What you have, why it is relevant to something they published, & a link. No attachments, no preamble.
- Do not ask for a link explicitly in a cold email. Offer the resource. If it is genuinely useful, the link follows.
- Follow up once. A single polite follow-up after a week is reasonable. A third email is spam.
Track replies rather than sends. A campaign with 40 sends & 8 conversations is healthier than one with 400 sends & 3.
Link reclamation: the fastest wins available
Before you build anything new, collect what you are already owed. This is the highest return activity in link building & most businesses have never done it.
Unlinked mentions. Set up alerts for your brand name. When a publication mentions you without linking, a short, friendly note asking whether they would add a link succeeds surprisingly often, because the author already decided you were worth mentioning.
Broken inbound links. Pages on your site that moved or were deleted may still have external links pointing at the old URL. Find them in your backlink data, then redirect the old URL to the closest relevant page. No outreach required.
Broken links on other people's resource pages. Find resource pages in your sector, identify dead links on them, & suggest your equivalent page as a replacement. You are doing the site owner a favour, which is why this works.
Relationships beat campaigns
The uncomfortable truth is that the most productive link sources are people who already know who you are. Journalists who have used you as a source before. Association contacts. Suppliers, partners & clients. Event organisers.
Treat that as a deliberate programme rather than an accident. Contribute genuine expert commentary when journalists request sources. Speak at industry events. Publish something worth quoting. Sponsor things you would sponsor anyway & make sure the listing links properly. Over eighteen months this produces a steadier flow of relevant links than any outreach campaign, & it compounds.
This is where link building & digital PR stop being separate disciplines. The distinction is largely about who you are talking to & why.
What to avoid, plainly
Private blog networks. Paid guest posts on sites that sell them openly. Comment & forum link drops. Reciprocal link exchanges at scale. Automated directory submissions. Links from sites whose content is machine generated. All of these are detectable, all of them are eventually discounted, & the cleanup cost when they are exceeds whatever they delivered.
The disclosure rule is simple: if you would not be comfortable explaining how you obtained a link, do not obtain it that way.
Measuring properly
Do not report link counts alone. Report referring domains gained, their topical relevance, & whether the linked pages moved in visibility over the following months. Links act slowly, so judge a programme on two quarters rather than two weeks.
Also track the assets themselves. A single resource that continues to attract links passively is worth more than a campaign that ended. That is what you are building towards: a small number of pages that keep earning without further spend.
If you want a programme built around asset creation rather than volume, look at how we structure link building & content marketing together, or tell us what you have that is worth linking to.