The best backlink is a link from a page people actually read, on a site relevant to yours, placed because someone thought your page was worth citing. Everything else is an approximation of that, and the approximations vary a lot in how close they get.
What follows is twelve tactics, ordered roughly by how much a link from each one is worth against how much work it costs. Each includes the tool you would actually use.
How we checked this
Every tool and platform named below was loaded on its live site in August 2026 and captured there. This matters in the digital PR category specifically, where several source platforms have changed hands, rebranded or shut down in the past two years and stale articles still recommend the versions that are gone. One platform on this page, Help a B2B Writer, now serves as MentionMatch, which is the sort of change worth checking before you build a workflow on something.
What separates a good backlink from a bad one
| Factor | Good | Worthless |
|---|---|---|
| Placement | Inside the body of a relevant article | Footer, author bio, links page |
| Traffic on the linking page | Real visitors | None, regardless of domain score |
| Relevance | Same or adjacent topic | Unrelated, generic directory |
| Editorial reason | Someone chose to cite you | You paid or submitted |
| Durability | Still there in a year | Removed in the next redesign |
1. Build an asset worth citing
Every tactic below is easier when you have something people want to reference. Original data, a survey of your customers, a calculator, a genuinely comprehensive guide.
The reason this is first is that outreach without an asset is asking a stranger for a favour, and outreach with one is offering them something to use. The reply rates are not comparable.
Effort: high, weeks. Payoff: the highest here, and it compounds. Tool: Ahrefs or Semrush to find which assets in your niche already attract links.
2. Digital PR through source platforms
Journalists post what they need, you respond with a quote, you get cited. Qwoted is the strongest of the current platforms, with Featured, SourceBottle, Connectively and Help a Reporter Out all still operating.
Links from genuine news publications are the highest-trust links available, and this is the only route to them that does not require a PR agency.
Effort: medium, 30 minutes a day. Payoff: high, occasionally very high. Tool: Qwoted, then Featured for volume.
3. Featured, for a steadier stream of requests
Featured works on the same model with a heavier focus on business and marketing publications, and a structured question format that makes responses faster to write.
Between it and Qwoted, most weeks will contain two or three requests genuinely worth answering.
Effort: low once you have a routine. Payoff: medium, consistent. Tool: Featured.
4. Competitor link gap analysis
Pull the backlink profiles of the three sites ranking above you and find the domains linking to two or more of them but not to you. Those domains have already demonstrated they will link to a site like yours.
This is the single highest-yield prospecting exercise in link building, and almost nobody does it properly.
Effort: low, an afternoon. Payoff: high. Tool: Semrush or Ahrefs link intersect.
5. Convert unlinked mentions
Find pages that name your brand without linking to it, then ask. It is the easiest yes in link building because the writer already decided you were worth mentioning.
Set an alert so new mentions surface while the article is fresh, which is when editors are most willing to edit.
Effort: low. Payoff: medium, and reliable. Tool: brand monitoring in Semrush, Ahrefs or Majestic.
6. Contextual exchange, no outreach
We build Distribb, so treat this as disclosed rather than neutral. It runs a backlink exchange across a network of real businesses, placing contextual links inside articles being published anyway, with no emails sent.
The honest positioning against everything else here: it is lower ceiling and lower effort. You will not get a link from a national title this way, and you will get relevant contextual links without spending your week on outreach.
Effort: minimal. Payoff: medium, continuous. Honest limit: you do not choose the partner sites, and it does not replace digital PR for high-authority placements.
7. Guest posting, done the slow way
Guest posting still works when the target site has real readers and you pitch a specific idea rather than a topic. It stopped working as a volume tactic years ago.
The test is simple: would you write this post if the link were nofollow? If not, the site is not worth the time.
Effort: high per placement. Payoff: medium to high depending on the site. Tool: BuzzStream to manage the relationships.
8. Broken link building
Find pages linking to something that no longer exists, produce a replacement, and tell the site owner. You are doing them a favour, which is why reply rates beat cold outreach.
Dead resources are more common than most people expect. Five of the pillar pages most commonly cited in content marketing articles now 404, as we found when checking our own pillar page examples.
Effort: medium. Payoff: medium. Tool: Ahrefs broken link report plus Respona for the outreach.
9. Podcasts and interviews
Every podcast episode produces a show notes page with a link to your site. Most hosts are actively looking for guests, which inverts the usual outreach dynamic.
The links are usually from lower-authority domains, and they are editorial, relevant and permanent.
Effort: medium, an hour per appearance. Payoff: medium, plus the audience. Tool: SourceBottle and podcast guest directories.
10. Free tools as link magnets
A calculator, a checker or a generator earns links for years without further work. Hunter's own free email finder is a good example of the pattern: the tool ranks, gets cited, and feeds the paid product.
It needs development time, which is why most sites skip it and why the ones that do it keep the links.
Effort: high, one-off. Payoff: high, and durable. Tool: whatever you build with.
11. Original diagrams and screenshots
Writers need images they are allowed to use. Producing clear original diagrams, annotated screenshots or charts of your own data gives them a reason to cite you.
This is the cheapest link-earning tactic that almost nobody runs deliberately.
Effort: low per asset. Payoff: medium, accumulates quietly. Tool: any design tool, plus Pitchbox to tell relevant writers the assets exist.
12. Keep the links you already have
Links disappear. Sites redesign, articles get pruned, links get switched to nofollow, and nobody tells you. Monitoring surfaces it while the relationship is still warm enough to ask for a fix.
Recovering a lost link is faster than earning a new one and almost always cheaper.
Effort: minimal once configured. Payoff: medium, entirely defensive. Tool: Linkody or Backlink Manager.
What to stop doing
Buying links from marketplaces at volume. They work until they do not, and the failure is not gradual.
Directory submissions. Outside genuine industry and local directories with real editorial standards, this stopped mattering more than a decade ago.
Comment and forum links. Nofollowed, ignored and mildly embarrassing.
Reciprocal linking at scale. A few relevant swaps are normal. Fifty with matching anchor text is a pattern, and pattern is what gets detected.
Chasing domain rating. A DR 70 domain with no traffic passes less than a DR 30 site your customers actually read, which is the point our step-by-step guide to generating backlinks automatically opens with.
FAQ
What makes a backlink high quality? Relevance to your topic, real traffic on the linking page, placement inside the body content, and an editorial reason for existing. Domain authority is a proxy for these, and a poor one on its own. Our guide to high quality backlinks goes further into each of those four tests.
How many backlinks do I need to rank? Look at what the pages ranking for your target term have. If they average twenty referring domains and you have three, that gap is your answer. There is no universal number. Measuring what the links you already have are doing is covered in our guide to checking backlinks in Google Analytics 4.
How long do backlinks take to work? Four to twelve weeks for a measurable effect on competitive terms, sometimes faster on long-tail. Anything promising days is describing a different thing. Where software can shorten that timeline is covered in our guide to building backlinks automatically.
Are free backlinks worth getting? Free directory and profile links, no. Free editorial links from digital PR, podcasts and unlinked mentions, absolutely, and they are the best links most sites will ever get. Which of those are worth the hours is set out in our guide to getting backlinks free.
Is buying backlinks worth the risk? It is against Google's guidelines and a large part of the industry does it anyway. If you do, buy few, buy relevant, and keep the anchor text natural. Do not build a business on it. The tactics that stay inside the guidelines are collected in our guide to getting more backlinks.
What is the fastest tactic here? Converting unlinked mentions, because the decision has already been made. Digital PR is next, and can produce a link within days if you respond to the right request.
Should I use nofollow links at all? They still bring traffic and Google treats them as a hint rather than an instruction. Do not refuse a relevant link from a site with real readers because of an attribute.
Where to start
Pick two tactics rather than twelve. Competitor gap analysis to build the prospect list, and digital PR through Qwoted or Featured to earn the links. That combination produces results within a month for most sites.
If the outreach itself is the part you will not sustain, Distribb's backlink exchange places contextual links from real businesses in adjacent niches without any emails being sent, and the content engine produces the pages those links point at. Lower ceiling than digital PR, and it happens whether or not you have time this week. Three-day free trial.
Four neighbouring pages go deeper than any single tactic here does. What backlinks are is the primer, dofollow backlinks settles the attribute question, building backlinks for a small business is the low-budget version, and backlink exchange platforms compares the exchanges themselves.