Link building is a process that constitutes the base of your SEO efforts. Links are one of the most important off-page SEO factors. Without them, the chances of ever gaining a satisfying amount of traffic are minimal. For that reason, we will showcase 3 effective link building tactics in this article.

Creating quality content and web pages is essential for ranking. However, without authority sites linking towards them, your efforts will not be effective. Many SEOs consider that your focus should be on the content alone, and not on the links. Even if that piece of advice can be effective sometimes, you still need to gain links.

What Has Changed Since This Article Was First Published

The three tactics below still work, but the environment around them has moved on considerably. Two changes matter most. First, in September 2019 Google introduced the rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" link attributes and announced that it would treat all link attributes, including nofollow, as hints rather than strict instructions. Second, with the December 2022 link spam update, Google began using its SpamBrain system to neutralise unnatural links instead of only demoting the sites that built them. In practice that means a bad link is now far more likely to be quietly ignored than to help you, so paying for volume is a good way to buy nothing at all.

The second shift is on the demand side. Search results now sit alongside AI-generated summaries and assistants that pull from a handful of trusted sources. Being the site that other people cite is what puts you in that pool. That makes the underlying logic of link building more important, not less: you are not collecting links, you are collecting reasons for other people to reference you.

Before you run any of the tactics below, read Google’s spam policies once, properly. The section on link spam is short, and it draws the line clearly: links intended to manipulate rankings, including exchanges of money, goods or services for links that pass ranking credit, are a violation. Everything in this article is designed to stay on the right side of that line.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is one of the oldest ways of attaining new quality links. Over the years, it was abused by many webmasters with spammy purposes. For that reason, it gained a slightly bad rap in the community.

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. – Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam at Google”

Contrary to the belief of some, guest blogging is still effective more than a decade after that warning. This strategy is being promoted by many experts in the field. However, the difference is made by the way people use it.

When outreaching for guest blogging collaborations, your aim should be to create win-win situations for all parties involved. You should provide the website owner with quality content that can help his audience. In the process, you can get more awareness, access to a wider audience, and the chance of growing your portfolio.

How to run a guest posting campaign, step by step

Define the page you want to strengthen. Pick one commercial page or one pillar article, not your whole site. Everything else in the campaign follows from that decision.
Build a prospect list. Start from the sites that already rank for your target topic, the sites that link to your competitors, and the publications your customers actually read. Build a long list deliberately, so you can afford to reject most of it.
Qualify every candidate against the criteria in the next section. Expect to delete half the list at this stage. That is normal and it is the step most people skip.
Find the right person. An editor’s name and a real email address beat a generic contact form almost every time. Check the masthead, the author archive and the site’s LinkedIn presence.
Pitch three specific titles, not a generic offer. Each title should reference something already published on their site and explain what it adds.
Write the piece you would publish on your own site. If you would not put your name on it, it will not earn a link that lasts.
Place the link where it belongs: inside the body, on an anchor that describes the destination, pointing at the page from step one. One contextual link in the body is worth far more than a link parked in an author bio.
Record everything in a simple sheet: site, contact, date pitched, date published, live URL, anchor text. In six months this sheet is your most valuable asset.

How to qualify a site before you pitch

A site is worth your time when most of the following are true. If it fails three or more, move on.

It gets organic search traffic, not just a high third-party authority score. A domain with a strong metric and a flat traffic graph is usually a recycled expired domain.
Its topics are genuinely adjacent to yours. A finance blog linking to a plumbing supplier makes sense to nobody, including a search engine.
It publishes named authors with real histories, not a rotating cast of one-post contributors.
Its outbound link profile is sane. If every article links out to a casino, a crypto exchange and a mattress brand, your link will sit in bad company.
It does not advertise “guest post accepted, $X” on a marketplace. That is a paid link, and paid links that pass ranking credit are a policy violation.
Its own pages are indexed. Search for a distinctive sentence from a recent post. If nothing comes back, the site is not in the index and the link is worthless.

What a pitch that gets replies actually contains

Four short parts, under 150 words in total. One sentence proving you read the site, naming a specific article and what you would add to it. One sentence on who you are and why you can write it. Three proposed titles with a one-line angle each. One closing question that is easy to answer: “Would any of these work for you, or would you rather I pitch something else?” No attachments, no praise, no paragraph about your company’s mission.

The Study Strategy

Even if a lesser-known tactic, the study strategy can be very effective and beneficial for everybody. While writing your articles, you will often have to reference certain statistics and studies. Instead of doing that, you can always create your niche study to obtain the needed data.

This will provide your audience with quality statistics but it can also make wonders for your link building efforts. If you outreach and reference a large number of experts, they will naturally want to spread the word about your study. You can gain a lot of new authority links in the process.

Moreover, because your study is contributing to the whole community, other websites will start referencing it. Useful studies tend to gain a lot of links this way, even from top-quality sites.

Turning a study into links, step by step

Find the missing number. Search your topic plus words like “statistics”, “average”, “benchmark” or “report”. If writers keep citing a source from years ago, or keep citing nothing at all, you have found your gap.
Choose a data source you can actually access. In order of difficulty: your own anonymised product or service data, a survey of your customers or industry peers, a manual audit of a defined sample of public pages, or public open data that nobody has bothered to process.
Write the method down before you collect anything. Sample size, time period, how respondents or pages were selected, what you excluded. This paragraph is what makes journalists comfortable citing you.
Publish the findings on a permanent URL of your own. Not a PDF, not a slide deck, not a social post. A page you control, with a clear headline for each finding.
Make each finding quotable and each chart embeddable. Give every chart a title, a source line with your domain, and a plain-text version underneath for anyone who wants to copy the numbers.
Outreach to everyone who has a reason to care: writers who cited the outdated figure, the experts you referenced, trade publications, association newsletters, and the communities where your audience already argues about this topic.
Refresh it on a schedule. An annual update turns one campaign into an asset that collects links every year without new outreach.

A worked example

Imagine you run a regional e-commerce platform for bicycle parts. You have no budget for a market research firm, but you do have order data and a mailing list. You export two years of anonymised orders, strip anything identifying, and calculate three things: how delivery times vary by county, which months carry the repair peak, and how order value shifts between road and mountain segments. Then you survey your mailing list with five questions about how far people ride and how often they replace parts, and you state clearly how many people answered.

That is a publishable study. It costs you analysis time and nothing in cash. The outreach list writes itself: cycling magazines, local sports desks, tourism boards planning routes, and the manufacturers whose parts appear in the data. Nobody else can produce those numbers, which is exactly why they get cited. Note what makes it work — not the size of the dataset, but the fact that the numbers did not exist anywhere before you published them.

Broken Link Building

Over time, broken links start making their appearance in every site. Many domains expire, some sites get abandoned or others just delete certain posts. If a site is linking to a broken page that constitutes a great opportunity for wise SEOs.

If an article from a site has broken links, you can always volunteer to replace them with your content. If you have articles that are relevant and helpful many sites will accept them. You can even decide to create an article around a broken link if you think it’s worth it. However, bear in mind that the quality of the content is the most important one.

The broken link building workflow

Pick a source of dead targets. The three reliable ones are a competitor’s broken backlinks report in any backlink tool, a crawl of a large resource page in your niche with a desktop crawler, and the backlink profile of a site in your industry that has clearly shut down.
Confirm the target is really dead. A 404 or a parked page qualifies. A redirect to a live page does not, and neither does a temporary 503.
Check what the dead page used to be. Open it in the Wayback Machine and read the archived version. You need to know what the link was promising before you offer a replacement.
Decide whether you already have the replacement. If your existing article covers the same ground, you are ready. If it does not, only write a new one when the number of sites linking to that dead page justifies the effort.
Pull the full list of pages still linking to the dead URL, then prioritise the ones that get traffic and are still actively maintained.
Email the person who maintains the page, not a general inbox. Name the broken link, quote the sentence it sits in, and offer your page as one option. Mentioning a second, non-competing replacement makes the message read as helpful rather than self-serving.
Follow up once, a week later, and then stop.

When broken link building is not worth it

The dead page is linked from a handful of abandoned blogs that nobody updates. No editor, no edit.
Your replacement is only loosely related. Editors notice, and a mismatched swap gets ignored.
The linking pages are themselves unindexed or thin. You would be trading real effort for a link that carries nothing.
The dead resource was a tool or a dataset and you are offering a blog post. Replace like with like or do not bother.

Which Tactic Should You Start With?

The honest answer depends on what you already have. If you have writing capacity, start with guest blogging. If you have data nobody else has, start with a study. If you have a solid back catalogue of articles and little time to write new ones, start with broken links.

Tactic	What you need	Effort per link	Scales?	Main risk
Guest blogging	Writing capacity, a specific angle, a qualified prospect list	Medium and constant	Yes, with a team	Drifting into paid placements and link farms
Original study	A data source others lack, analysis, clear charts	High upfront, low afterwards	Compounds on its own	Weak or unoriginal data earns no coverage
Broken link building	A crawler, an existing back catalogue, patience	Low per attempt, low reply rate	Limited by prospect supply	Chasing dead pages nobody still links to

Most sites end up running all three, but sequencing matters. Guest posts and broken link outreach produce early wins that keep a project alive; the study is the one that keeps producing links two years later. Whichever you begin with, connect the new links to the rest of your site properly, because an authority link that lands on an orphaned page passes very little onward. That is the whole point of internal cross-linking.

How to Measure Whether Any of It Worked

Link building fails quietly when nobody measures it, so agree on the reporting before the first email goes out. Four things are worth tracking, in this order.

Referring domains, not total links. Ten links from one site are one relationship. Count unique domains and check monthly whether the curve is still rising.
Whether the linking page is indexed. A link on a page that is not in the index does nothing. Search for a unique phrase from the page to confirm.
Impressions and average position for the target page in Google Search Console. Compare the eight weeks before the campaign with the eight weeks after. Movement usually shows up in impressions before it shows up in clicks.
Referral sessions and conversions in GA4. Use the Traffic acquisition report and look at the referral channel. Good links from relevant publications send real people, and those people are the argument that keeps the budget approved.

Give it time. A link only starts to matter once the page carrying it has been recrawled, and that can take weeks on a small site. Judging a campaign after two weeks is a common reason good work gets abandoned early.

Mistakes That Waste a Link Building Budget

Buying volume. Bulk packages of links are the exact pattern automated spam detection was built to neutralise. The usual outcome is not a penalty, it is nothing at all.
Over-optimised anchors. If most of your incoming anchors are the same commercial phrase, the profile stops looking earned. Brand names, URLs and natural sentences should dominate.
Sending the same AI-written email to 500 people. Editors see these constantly and recognise them instantly. Use automation for research and tracking, write the first two sentences yourself.
Pointing everything at the homepage. Links work hardest when they land on the page that answers the query.
Ignoring links you already have. Broken pages on your own site, unlinked brand mentions and old links pointing at redirected URLs are the cheapest wins available, and almost nobody claims them.
No follow-through. One polite follow-up recovers conversations that would otherwise never start. Three or more damages a relationship you may want later.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many links do I need to rank?

There is no universal number, and anyone quoting one is guessing. The workable approach is comparative: look at the pages currently ranking for your target query, count how many unique domains link to each of those specific pages, and treat the middle of that range as your working target. On low-competition queries the answer is often close to zero, and the content itself decides.

Is guest posting against Google’s guidelines?

Writing for another publication is not. Large-scale article campaigns whose main purpose is placing keyword-rich links are listed as link spam, and so is paying for a placement that passes ranking credit. If money or goods change hands, the link should carry rel="sponsored". The test is simple: would you still want the placement if the link were nofollowed?

Do nofollow links have any value?

Yes, in two ways. Since 2019 Google treats link attributes as hints rather than absolute instructions, so they are not automatically discarded. More importantly, a nofollow link from a publication your customers read still sends traffic, still builds recognition, and often leads to a followed citation elsewhere later.

How long until links affect rankings?

Realistically, weeks rather than days, and often a couple of months for competitive queries. The link has to be crawled on the page that carries it, and that page’s own crawl frequency sets the pace. Plan campaigns in quarters, not sprints.

Should I disavow links I did not build?

Usually not. Google has repeatedly said it ignores the overwhelming majority of low-quality links automatically, and the disavow tool is easy to misuse. Reserve it for cases where you know links were built manipulatively, typically by a previous agency, and where you cannot get them removed.

Do these tactics still make sense with AI answers in search results?

They make more sense. AI-generated answers lean on sources that are widely referenced and easy to verify, which is precisely what an original study or a genuinely useful resource page becomes. The mechanics of outreach barely change; the payoff simply extends beyond blue links.

Conclusion

The process of link building is essential for the creation of any website that gains traffic and generates conversions. If you want your content to be read by the masses, you need to start gaining more authority links. The 3 link building tactics mentioned above can be very effective if used correctly.

Choose one of them, run it properly for a full quarter, and measure it with the four metrics above before you judge it. Consistency beats cleverness here: a handful of relevant, editorially given links each month, pointed at pages that deserve them, will outperform any shortcut that promises hundreds. If you would rather have someone run that process for you, that is what we do at Web-Push.

3 Link Building Tactics: Gain More Links in 2019