Mention backlinks to most business owners and they probably picture an agency sending hundreds of cold emails, paying for guest posts, or asking for specific wording in every link. It’s not a completely unfair impression. A lot of link building has been done that way, and Google has spent years trying to limit tactics such as paid links, excessive link exchanges, automated link building, and guest posts created mainly to influence rankings.
The agencies still getting real results have mostly stopped fighting that reputation and started ignoring it. They build something worth referencing, find the publishers who would actually want it, and let the links follow. This article looks at how experienced SEO companies approach link building, and why strategies built around useful content and real relationships tend to hold up longer than the shortcuts.
Links Still Matter, but the Shortcut Is the Problem
Google still treats links as a signal, both for understanding what a page is about and for finding new pages in the first place. Its current documentation frames links as useful context, not as votes to be farmed.
What Google is explicit about is the manufacturing side: buying or selling links for ranking value, reciprocal exchanges done at scale, automated link programs, large guest-posting campaigns built primarily to move rankings. None of that is subtle once you know what to look for. And paid placements aren’t automatically off-limits either, the real question is whether the link is labeled honestly and whether anyone’s trying to pass ranking credit through it.
Pitching “100 backlinks a month” does not say much. The number says nothing about whether those links are relevant, compliant, or worth having.
Create Something People Have an Actual Reason To Cite
Most durable link campaigns are decided before outreach ever starts. Original research works because it gives another site a reason to cite something that doesn’t exist anywhere else: a survey, a benchmark, a proprietary dataset, a calculator that solves a real problem. The link happens because the content is useful to the publisher. Nobody had to ask for a favor. The evidence for this isn’t theoretical. Breeze reported that one remote-work survey generated 133 unique backlinks from a survey that cost about $1,350 to produce.
BuzzSumo showed its success with one of its content. One of their posts went viral and generated more than 2,000 links from over 100 domains during its first week, and continued growing afterward.
That doesn’t mean all content will lead to thousands of links. It means the underlying idea has evidence behind it: original information can give publishers something they can’t get from another generic blog post.
Digital PR Is Really About Having Something Worth Reporting
Digital PR gets thrown around as a link-building buzzword, but the useful part is fairly simple. Give journalists information they can use.
That might be original research, a new dataset, a strong industry trend, an expert response to a developing story, or analysis that helps explain something happening in a particular market. The journalist decides whether the information belongs in the story. The SEO team doesn’t get to dictate the anchor text or guarantee a followed link.
This is one reason PR-driven links can be more valuable than a large batch of generic placements. The publisher has an audience, an editorial process, and an actual reason for mentioning the company.
Google’s own guidance makes a similar distinction. Guest posts and contributed articles aren’t inherently against its policies, but large-scale campaigns where the primary purpose is building links can cross into link-scheme territory, particularly when they use keyword-rich links across many sites.
Paid Links Need To Be Treated Like Paid Links
There is a straightforward way to handle a commercial link: label it.
Google recommends rel=”sponsored” for advertisements and paid placements, and rel=”ugc” for links created by users. nofollow remains an option in situations where a site doesn’t want to associate itself with the linked page or pass certain signals.
This doesn’t mean every sponsored article is bad marketing. A company can pay to sponsor content, work with publishers, send products to creators, or participate in other commercial arrangements. The important question is whether the resulting links are properly qualified and whether the campaign is trying to buy ranking credit.
An agency that won’t explain how it handles paid placements should get more questions, not a bigger budget.
Broken Link Building Still Has A Place
Broken link building isn’t particularly exciting. It involves finding a relevant page containing a dead link, creating or identifying a useful replacement, and contacting the site owner. That sounds almost too simple, but that’s also why it can work.
The difficult part is relevance. The replacement page needs to fit naturally with the original article, and the person receiving the outreach should have a clear reason to update the link. Sending the same pitch to thousands of unrelated websites misses the point.
Broken-link campaigns also aren’t guaranteed to produce a long list of backlinks. The goal is to find relevant opportunities where the replacement actually improves the page. But when the replacement genuinely improves a page, the request is based on a real editorial problem rather than an artificial SEO arrangement.
Internal Links Do The Same Job, For Free
External links get most of the attention because they’re harder to get. Internal links are easier to overlook because they are already under your control.
Google guidance on this is straightforward: important pages need internal links from other relevant pages, and there’s no magic count to hit. The goal is making it obvious, to both visitors and search engines, how pages on a site relate to each other.
Before spending money chasing outreach, it’s worth checking whether the site’s own structure is holding pages back. A great backlink pointed at a page buried four clicks deep, with nothing else linking to it, won’t do much.
Not Every Odd-Looking Link Is A Crisis
SEO advice around bad backlinks can get complicated quickly. Not every strange-looking link needs to be removed or disavowed.
Google’s Penguin algorithm launched in 2012 and folded into the core algorithm by 2016, was built to reduce the impact of spammy links, and Google has since moved it to real-time processing. But Google itself says most sites never need the disavow tool at all. It’s meant for cases where spammy or artificial links exist at a scale that has caused, or is likely to cause, a manual action.
That is why an agency recommending that you disavow every suspicious backlink deserves a closer look. A few unusual links showing up in Search Console do not automatically mean there is a problem.
What To Ask Before Hiring A Link-Building Agency
Start with where the links actually come from and why a website would want to link to the content in the first place. Then ask how paid placements get handled, and how personalized the outreach really is versus how much of it is templated.
The agencies producing links that last aren’t the ones promising the biggest monthly number. They’re building things other sites genuinely want to reference, then finding sensible ways to put that work in front of the right people. Everything else is just a faster way to get caught.
The better question, though, is about failure. Ask to see a campaign that didn’t land. Link building doesn’t produce predictable results every time, and an agency willing to walk through what a shortfall taught them usually tells you more than one that only shows the wins. Browse our vetted list of SEO agencies to find a team that understands link building.