Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to yours. Those backlinks act as third-party endorsements that tell search engines your content is worth referencing, and they remain one of the core ways Google determines which pages deserve to rank. The tactics have changed dramatically over the last few years, but the principle hasn’t: sites that earn links from relevant, authoritative sources tend to outperform those that don’t.
At Gorilla Marketing, we’ve been building links for clients across competitive UK markets for over a decade. We’ve watched the tactics that work evolve, seen the ones that don’t get dismantled by algorithm updates, and helped businesses recover from the fallout of bad link building. This guide covers all of it: what Google actually cares about, what strategies hold up, and where most businesses go wrong.
What Is Link Building and Why Does It Still Matter?
A backlink is a hyperlink from one website to another. When a site links to yours, it’s essentially saying “this page is worth visiting.” Google has used these signals since its earliest days. The original PageRank algorithm, published by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, treated links as votes of confidence. More votes from trusted sources meant higher rankings.
That fundamental concept still holds, but with significantly more nuance. Google’s systems now evaluate link quality, relevance, context, and naturalness. A single editorially placed link from a relevant industry publication is worth more than hundreds of directory submissions or forum profile links.
John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, has suggested that links probably aren’t “in the top 3” ranking factors anymore. That statement got a lot of attention in the SEO community, and it’s worth taking seriously. But “not in the top 3” doesn’t mean irrelevant. It means Google has gotten better at understanding content quality, user behaviour, and entities without leaning on links so heavily. Links still contribute to how Google assesses authority and trust. They’re part of how Google evaluates the prominence of a domain and the credibility of individual pages. They’re just not the blunt instrument they used to be.
How Does Google Evaluate Links?
Google doesn’t treat all links equally. Understanding how their systems assess link value is fundamental to building links that actually move the needle.
Relevance
A link from a site in your industry carries more weight than one from an unrelated domain. If you sell commercial insurance and get a link from an insurance trade publication, that signals topical authority. A link from a random tech blog? Less so. Google’s systems have become increasingly good at understanding topical relationships between linking and linked-to pages.
Authority of the Linking Domain
Not all websites carry the same weight. A link from a well-established, frequently cited publication sends a stronger signal than one from a brand-new site with no track record. Third-party metrics like Ahrefs’ Domain Rating or Moz’s Domain Authority aren’t Google metrics, but they’re reasonable proxies for the general concept. According to the Editorial.link 2024 survey, 64.1% of SEO professionals prefer Ahrefs’ DR and UR metrics for evaluating link quality.
Anchor Text
The clickable text in a link gives Google context about what the target page is about. If someone links to your page with the anchor text “commercial insurance brokers UK,” that tells Google something specific. But over-optimised anchor text profiles are a red flag. Natural link profiles include a mix of branded anchors (“Gorilla Marketing”), generic anchors (“click here,” “this article”), URL anchors, and some keyword-rich anchors. When every link pointing to a page uses the exact same keyword-rich anchor, it looks manufactured. Because it usually is.
Placement and Context
A link within the main body content of an article carries more weight than one buried in a footer, sidebar, or author bio. Links that sit naturally within a relevant paragraph, surrounded by related content, are treated differently from those stuffed into a blogroll or resource list with no editorial context.
Link Attributes: Nofollow, Sponsored, and UGC
Google introduced `rel=”nofollow”` in 2005, and added `rel=”sponsored”` and `rel=”ugc”` in 2019. These attributes tell Google how to treat the link:
Nofollow – a hint (not a directive) that Google may choose not to follow or pass ranking value through the link
Sponsored – identifies paid or sponsored placements
UGC – marks links in user-generated content like comments or forum posts
Google treats all three as “hints,” meaning it may still choose to crawl, index, or even count them for ranking purposes. But the broad consensus is that followed, editorially placed links carry the most direct value.
What Types of Links Exist?
Not every link is the same, and how you acquire them matters as much as where they come from.
Editorial Links
These are the gold standard. A journalist, blogger, or content creator links to your page because they genuinely found it useful. You didn’t ask for it, pay for it, or negotiate it. They just thought it was worth referencing. These are the hardest to get and the most valuable to have.
Resource Page Links
Many websites maintain resource pages or “recommended links” sections. If your content genuinely fits, reaching out to request inclusion is a legitimate tactic. The key word is “genuinely.” Spamming every resource page on the internet with a templated email isn’t link building. It’s pest control in reverse.
Guest Posts
Writing content for another publication in exchange for a link back to your site. This one sits in complicated territory. Done well, with genuinely useful content placed on relevant, high-quality sites, it works. Done badly, with thin content placed on sites that exist purely to accept guest posts, it’s a spam signal. We cover the full picture in our dedicated guide to guest posting.
Niche Edits
Also called “link insertions.” This is where you get a link added to an existing, already-indexed piece of content on another site. It can be effective when done through genuine outreach, but it’s also a tactic heavily used by link sellers who offer to insert links into posts they have access to. The line between editorial and manipulative is thinner here than most people admit.
Expert Commentary and Reactive PR
Services like HARO (Help A Reporter Out) and similar journalist-source platforms connect reporters with expert sources. You provide a quote, the journalist uses it, and you get a link from the publication. This remains one of the more reliable strategies for earning high-authority links, particularly from news outlets that would be nearly impossible to get links from otherwise.
The challenge is volume and competition. Every SEO knows about HARO now. Response rates have dropped, quality requirements have increased, and journalists are pickier about who they quote. But if you have genuine expertise and can respond quickly with something useful, it still delivers.
Brand Mentions
Sometimes a website mentions your brand without linking to you. These unlinked mentions still carry some value. Google’s systems can associate brand mentions with entities, and there’s a reasonable argument that unlinked mentions contribute to brand authority signals even without a direct hyperlink. More practically, they’re also easy outreach targets. A polite email asking for a link to be added where your brand is already mentioned has a high conversion rate.
What Link Building Strategies Actually Work?
Let’s cut to the tactics that hold up under scrutiny and align with how Google evaluates links in 2026.
Content That Earns Links Naturally
The most sustainable link building strategy is creating content that other people want to reference. Original research, data studies, comprehensive guides, tools, and genuinely useful resources attract links without you having to chase them. We cover how to create data-driven content that earns links in a dedicated article, but the core principle is simple: give people something they can’t get elsewhere, and they’ll link to it.
This isn’t abstract advice. Pages that rank well for informational queries and contain original data or frameworks become citation sources. Other content creators find them through search, reference them in their own articles, and the links accumulate over time.
Relationship-Based Outreach
Cold outreach emails get a bad reputation because most of them are terrible. But outreach built on genuine relationships works. This means engaging with journalists, editors, and bloggers in your space over time. Commenting on their work. Sharing their content. Being useful before you need something. When you do reach out with a link opportunity, you’re a known name rather than another spam email.
This doesn’t scale the way automated outreach does. That’s the point. The links you earn through genuine relationships tend to be higher quality, more relevant, and far more sustainable than anything mass-produced.
Digital PR
Digital PR blends traditional PR tactics with SEO objectives. You create a story, campaign, or data piece that’s genuinely newsworthy, then pitch it to journalists. Done well, a single campaign can generate dozens of high-authority links from national and industry publications. We go deeper on this in our digital PR guide, but it’s worth flagging here as one of the highest-impact link building approaches available.
According to the Editorial.link survey, 48.6% of SEO professionals view digital PR as the most effective link building tactic. That’s a strong consensus for any single approach.
Expert Source Platforms
HARO and its alternatives remain viable. The formula: monitor queries daily, respond fast, provide genuine expertise, and include relevant credentials. Not every response will land, but over months the links compound. News and media links are particularly valuable because they come from high-authority domains that are difficult to earn links from through any other method.
Strategic Partnerships and Co-Marketing
Creating content with complementary businesses, sponsoring industry events, or producing joint research can generate links from partners’ websites and from coverage of the collaboration. These links tend to be highly relevant because you’re working with businesses in adjacent spaces.
The key is finding partners whose audience overlaps with yours but who aren’t direct competitors. A web design agency partnering with an SEO agency to produce a joint study on site performance, for example. Both benefit from the content, both promote it to their networks, and the resulting links come from genuinely related sources.
Broken Link Building
Find broken outbound links on relevant websites, create content that matches what the dead link used to point to, then reach out and suggest your page instead. It’s a genuine value exchange: you’re helping a webmaster fix a broken user experience while earning a link. The hit rate is lower than it used to be (every SEO knows this tactic now), but it still works when you target high-quality pages and put effort into the replacement content.
What Doesn’t Work Anymore?
This section matters more than the strategies section. Knowing what to avoid saves you more money and risk than knowing what to pursue.
Buying Links
Purchasing links violates Google’s spam policies. Full stop. But the industry reality, according to the Editorial.link survey, is that 91.9% of SEO professionals assume their competitors are buying links. The average acceptable cost per link among those surveyed was $508.95.
That doesn’t make it safe. Google’s SpamBrain system, their AI-based spam detection technology, has been specifically trained to identify and devalue purchased links. The December 2022 link spam update and the March 2024 spam update both targeted manipulative link practices at scale. When Google detects purchased links, the best case is that those links simply stop passing value. The worst case is a manual action against your site.
The economics make it even less appealing when you factor in risk. You’re paying for links that could be devalued at any time, and if they are, you’ve got nothing to show for the spend. Money invested in content and digital PR at least leaves you with assets that have value beyond link acquisition.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
Networks of websites built specifically to link to your money site. These were effective for years, but Google’s ability to identify PBN patterns has improved dramatically. Shared hosting, similar site structures, thin content, unnatural linking patterns between network sites: SpamBrain catches it. The March 2024 spam update specifically called out “scaled content abuse” and manipulative linking, and PBNs sit squarely in that crosshair.
Link Farms and Directories
Mass submissions to low-quality directories, article directories, and link exchange networks. These stopped being effective years ago, but they persist because they’re cheap and easy. If someone offers you 500 links for a few hundred pounds, those links are coming from farms and directories that Google either ignores entirely or actively penalises.
Reciprocal Link Schemes
“I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Small-scale, natural reciprocal linking happens organically and isn’t a problem. But systematic link exchanges, especially through networks that coordinate swaps between unrelated sites, are treated as link schemes under Google’s spam policies.
Comment Spam and Forum Links
Dropping links in blog comments, forum signatures, and community posts. These are almost universally nofollowed now, and even when they’re not, Google’s systems are well-calibrated to identify and ignore them. The only thing you’re building with comment spam is a bad reputation.
Automated Link Building Software
Any tool that promises to build links automatically by submitting your site to hundreds or thousands of directories, bookmarking sites, or web 2.0 platforms. These produce exactly the kind of unnatural link patterns that SpamBrain is built to detect.
Scaled Guest Posting on Low-Quality Sites
There’s a distinction between writing a genuinely useful article for a respected industry publication and paying to place thin content on a site that exists purely to accept guest posts. The latter category is enormous. Entire networks of “write for us” sites operate as thinly disguised link selling operations. Google’s March 2024 spam update addressed “site reputation abuse” partly for this reason. If a site’s guest post section has no editorial standards and accepts anything with a fee attached, the links from it are worth less than nothing.
How Has SpamBrain Changed the Game?
SpamBrain deserves its own section because it represents the biggest shift in how Google handles link spam.
SpamBrain is Google’s AI-based spam prevention system. It doesn’t just identify spammy websites. It identifies spammy link patterns: sites that exist primarily to sell links, sites that buy links, and the relationships between them. Google has described it as capable of detecting both link buyers and link sellers.
The December 2022 link spam update was significant because it expanded SpamBrain’s capabilities to neutralise the effect of unnatural links across multiple languages. Sites that had been propping up rankings with purchased links saw those rankings drop as the artificial link equity was removed.
The March 2024 spam update went further, targeting manipulative link practices alongside scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. Google specifically updated its spam policies to be clearer about what constitutes link spam.
The practical implication: link manipulation has a shorter shelf life than it used to. Google’s detection systems improve with each update, and links that currently fly under the radar may not survive the next one. When Google removes the value of spammy links, any ranking benefit those links provided disappears with them, and there’s no recovery for the lost equity. You don’t get a chance to replace those links before your rankings drop.
Does Link Building Affect AI Search Results?
This is the question most businesses aren’t asking yet, but should be.
AI Overviews in Google, and standalone LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, all use source authority as part of how they select which content to reference. The exact mechanisms differ, but the principle is consistent: content from authoritative, well-linked sources is more likely to be cited or surfaced in AI-generated responses.
The Editorial.link survey found that 73.2% of SEO professionals believe backlinks influence whether a site appears in AI search results. That’s belief rather than confirmed mechanism, but it aligns with what we can observe. Sites with strong backlink profiles and genuine topical authority tend to appear more frequently in AI Overviews and as sources cited by LLMs.
For link building strategy, this means the same fundamentals apply. Building genuine authority through editorially earned links from relevant sources positions your site well for both traditional and AI-driven search. The difference is that AI systems tend to favour sources that demonstrate clear expertise and are frequently cited by other authoritative sources. It’s an amplification of the signals that already mattered.
If you want your brand to show up when someone asks an AI about your industry, you need the same link profile that helps you rank in traditional search: authoritative, relevant, and editorially earned.
When Should You NOT Prioritise Link Building?
This is the section most link building guides won’t include. But links aren’t always the highest-impact investment.
When Your Technical Foundation Is Broken
If Google can’t crawl, render, or index your pages properly, links won’t save you. Fix your technical SEO first. Broken internal linking, crawl errors, duplicate content issues, and rendering problems all need addressing before link building will have its full impact. Pouring links into a site with fundamental technical problems is pouring water into a leaky bucket.
When Your Content Doesn’t Deserve to Rank
Links can push a mediocre page up temporarily, but Google’s helpful content systems are designed to identify whether a page actually satisfies user intent. If your content is thin, outdated, or doesn’t answer the query as well as what’s already ranking, links are a plaster on a wound that needs stitches. Improve the content first.
When You’re in a Low-Competition Niche
Some industries and keywords simply don’t require aggressive link building. If you’re a specialist B2B business targeting long-tail queries with limited competition, solid on-page SEO and good content might be enough. Spending thousands per month on link building when your competitors have five backlinks each is overkill.
When You Can’t Measure the Impact
More than half of SEO professionals, 52.9% according to the Editorial.link survey, find measuring link building ROI difficult. If you can’t attribute rankings improvements or revenue to your link building spend, you’re flying blind. Before investing heavily, make sure you have the tracking and attribution in place to know whether it’s working. We cover this in more depth in our guide to measuring backlink value.
How Does Anchor Text Strategy Work?
Getting anchor text right is more about avoiding getting it wrong.
Natural link profiles are messy. They include branded mentions, URL anchors, generic phrases like “read more” or “this guide,” partial keyword matches, and occasionally exact-match keyword anchors. That messiness is what makes them look natural. Because they are.
Manipulated profiles look different. When a disproportionate number of links use the exact same keyword-rich anchor text, it signals artificial link building. Google’s algorithms have been tuned to detect this since the original Penguin update in 2012, and detection has only gotten sharper.
The practical advice: don’t engineer your anchor text. When you’re earning links through outreach, digital PR, or content, let the linking site choose their own anchor text. If you’re providing copy, vary it naturally. And if you’re looking at your existing profile and see a cluster of identical keyword anchors, that’s a legacy problem worth addressing.
What About Link Velocity?
Link velocity refers to the rate at which a site acquires new backlinks over time. A sudden spike in new links, especially if they all come from similar sources or use similar anchor text, can look unnatural.
Natural link acquisition is usually gradual. A well-promoted piece of content might generate a burst of links when it’s first published, and that’s fine. But a steady stream of links appearing at a suspiciously consistent rate from unrelated sites? That pattern looks like what it usually is: automated or purchased link building.
There’s no published threshold for what Google considers a suspicious rate. The principle is that your link acquisition should roughly mirror your content production and promotional activity. If you’re publishing major content campaigns, link spikes make sense. If your site is dormant and links keep appearing, that’s harder to explain.
How Do Links Relate to E-E-A-T?
Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) isn’t a ranking factor per se. It’s a set of criteria used by Google’s Search Quality Raters to evaluate page quality, and those evaluations inform how Google’s algorithms are tuned.
Links feed directly into the “Authoritativeness” component. When multiple trusted, relevant sources link to your site, that’s a signal of authority. It tells Google that people in your industry consider your content worth referencing.
But the relationship goes both ways. E-E-A-T also influences your ability to earn links. Sites with demonstrated expertise, clear author credentials, and a reputation for quality content attract more editorial links naturally. It’s a virtuous cycle: authority helps you earn links, and links reinforce your authority. We’ve written separately about E-E-A-T and Google’s trust framework, so we won’t rehash the full model here.
What Does a Good Link Building Campaign Actually Cost?
Let’s talk money, since most guides avoid it.
The Editorial.link survey put the average acceptable cost per quality link at $508.95 (roughly £400 at current exchange rates). That’s a market average across all methods. Some links cost nothing beyond the time to create great content. Others, particularly those earned through large-scale digital PR campaigns, carry significant upfront investment in research, creative, and outreach.
The same survey suggested a minimum monthly budget of $8,406 for competitive niches. That’s approximately £6,600 per month.
The biggest cost variable isn’t the link itself. It’s the approach. Content-led strategies have higher upfront costs (you’re creating research, tools, or resources) but compound over time as those assets continue to attract links. Outreach-heavy strategies have ongoing labour costs but can deliver more predictable results month to month.
And the hidden cost that everyone forgets: 75.1% of respondents cited premium backlink costs as their biggest obstacle, and 67.2% said they struggle to scale without sacrificing quality. Cheap link building almost always means low-quality link building. You get what you pay for.
What About Competitor Backlink Analysis?
Looking at where your competitors’ links come from is one of the most efficient ways to identify link opportunities for your own site. If a relevant publication has linked to three of your competitors’ guides on the same topic, that publication is clearly open to linking to content in your space. We’ve written a full guide to competitor backlink analysis that covers the methodology in detail.
What About Internal Links?
Internal linking, the links between pages on your own site, is a separate discipline from external link building, but the two work together. External links build your domain’s overall authority, while internal links distribute that authority across your pages. We cover internal linking strategy separately because it deserves its own treatment.
What About Toxic Links and Disavow Files?
If your site has a history of low-quality or spammy backlinks, whether from a previous agency’s tactics or a negative SEO attack, Google’s disavow tool lets you tell Google to ignore specific links. It’s a topic with enough nuance that we’ve covered it in a dedicated guide to toxic links and disavow files. The short version: Google says they’re good at ignoring bad links automatically, but the disavow tool exists for a reason.
How Should You Think About Link Building ROI?
Link building’s return is notoriously difficult to isolate. You can track new links acquired, monitor rankings changes, and measure organic traffic growth, but attributing a specific revenue figure to a specific link is nearly impossible. The fact that over half of SEO professionals struggle with link building attribution isn’t a sign that people are doing it wrong. It’s a reflection of genuinely complex multi-touch attribution.
The most practical approach: track link building as one component of your overall SEO investment, alongside content, technical improvements, and on-page optimisation. Measure the portfolio, not individual links. If your rankings and organic revenue are improving while you’re actively building links, the investment is working, even if you can’t point to a single link and say “that one did it.” The frameworks for doing this are more manageable than most people expect, once you stop trying to attribute at the individual link level.
So Where Does Link Building Stand in 2026?
Link building isn’t dead. It’s not dying. But it has matured beyond the point where you can throw money at it without a strategy and expect results.
The sites winning in organic search right now are earning links through genuine authority: original content, real expertise, editorial relationships, and digital PR that creates genuinely newsworthy stories. They’re building the kind of backlink profiles that look natural because they are natural.
The sites losing are the ones still buying links from agencies that promise “50 DA40+ links per month,” still using PBNs, still submitting to link farms and directories. Those tactics have a shorter lifespan with every SpamBrain update, and the cost of getting caught isn’t just lost rankings. It’s lost revenue, lost trust, and months of recovery work.
If you’re going to invest in link building, invest properly. Create content worth linking to. Build relationships with journalists and editors in your space. Invest in digital PR campaigns that generate coverage because the story is genuinely interesting. And measure the results honestly, accepting that attribution will never be perfect but directional data is enough.
The businesses that get this right don’t just build links. They build authority. And authority is what every search system, from Google’s core algorithm to AI Overviews to ChatGPT, is looking for.
