Link building strategies that still work, and three that do not
The criteria that decide whether a tactic is worth running: a linkable asset, a pitch that cites real work, a live target. Four that pass, three to skip.
Most link building strategies fail at the same point: the pitch. The tactic is rarely the problem, and the email almost always is.
Start with something worth linking to
Every strategy below assumes a page a stranger would reference without being paid. If you do not have one, outreach is just asking for a favour.
Linkable assets tend to share a property: they contain something the linker cannot get elsewhere. Original survey data. A tool that does one job. A genuinely comprehensive reference on a narrow subject. A strong opinion, argued properly, by someone qualified to hold it.
A rewritten summary of the top five results is not one of these. It is the most commonly produced piece of content in the industry and the least linked.
Guest posting, done without embarrassment
Guest posting still works when the post is good enough that the host would have commissioned it anyway.
Find targets by looking at where people in your field actually publish, not by searching for “write for us”. Then pitch a specific piece, not a willingness to write.
Here is a pitch that gets replies, which you can adapt directly:
Subject: Pitch: what 40 accounting firms told us about invoice chasing
Hi Rina,
Your piece on late payment culture last month made a point I have data on. We surveyed 40 small accounting firms this quarter about how they chase overdue invoices, and the split between automated and manual follow-up was far wider than I expected.
I could write that up as 1,200 words with the chart, exclusive to you. Happy to send an outline first.
Marcus Feld, Ledgerpoint
Three things make it work: a specific reference to their actual work, something they cannot get elsewhere, and a low-commitment next step. No paragraph about how much you admire the blog.
Broken link building
Find a dead page that people still link to, then offer your live equivalent.
- Pick a resource page or a well-linked article in your field.
- Run it through a link checker to find outbound 404s.
- Check whether you have, or could write, a genuine replacement.
- Email the page owner pointing out the dead link and offering yours.
The honest framing is what makes this land. You are doing them a small favour first. Keep the email to three sentences and mention the broken link before you mention yourself.
Its weakness is scale. Good targets are uncommon, and the tactic rewards patience over volume.
Resource pages
Some pages exist to list useful things. Getting onto one is a legitimate ask, provided you belong there.
Search for pages collecting tools or reading in your subject, check that they are maintained (a page last updated in 2019 will not respond), and send a short note explaining which section you fit and why. Expect a low response rate and a decent conversion rate among those who reply.
The skyscraper technique, with the caveat
The original method: find a well-linked piece, make something better, then ask everyone linking to the original to link to yours instead.
It worked well enough to be copied into the ground. Two adjustments make it viable now.
Better has to mean different, not longer. Adding 2,000 words to a competitor’s structure produces a longer version of a thing that already exists. Add what is missing: original data, a working example, a section nobody covers.
Ask people with a reason to switch. Someone who linked to a 2021 piece with outdated figures has a reason. Someone who linked to an evergreen essay does not.
Digital PR, which is where the real links are
Journalists need numbers. If you have data nobody else has, you have the ingredient national coverage is built from.
You do not need much. A survey of 200 people in your industry, run properly and written up honestly, is enough for a trade publication story. The rules are simple: publish the methodology, do not overclaim what the sample supports, and give the journalist the chart already made.
Three strategies to skip
Buying links. It violates Google’s guidelines, the sites selling them sell to everyone, and the footprint is exactly what link spam detection is built to find.
Mass directory submission. Business directories worked in 2009. Now the general ones are ignored and the niche ones are worth doing individually, which is a different activity.
Comment and forum link drops. Almost universally nofollow, and a reliable way to be remembered as the person who spammed the community.
Measuring whether any of it worked
Count referring domains, not links. Fifty links from one site is one relationship. Track:
- New referring domains per month, which is the honest measure of outreach.
- Whether the pages earning links are the pages you want ranking.
- Reply rate per campaign, because a 2% reply rate is a pitch problem, not a volume problem.
Where links stop being the constraint
Links raise a page’s ceiling. They do not fix a page that cannot be crawled, renders empty without JavaScript, or competes with three of your own posts for the same query. Those failures cap what any amount of outreach can achieve, and they are cheaper to fix.
The free Crawld scan covers that side: 129 checks across indexability, structure and content health, including whether your own pages are competing with each other. It does not build or measure links, and the transparency page is explicit about scope. If cannibalisation is the constraint, the audit page explains how it is detected.