Most of the backlinks people chase don’t do anything for their rankings. The ones that do come from real sites in your space, somebody on that site chose to link to you, and the link points at the page you’re trying to rank.
You get those links by giving people a reason to link. You’re a useful source, you made something worth citing, or they already know you and just never got around to it.
And by the way, directory lists, web 2.0 blogs and $50 link packages mostly get ignored by Google now, and some of them can go as far as getting you in trouble.
The short version
- Check that links are actually what’s holding you back. Plenty of pages don’t rank because the page itself is the problem.
- A good backlink comes from a relevant, real site, sits inside the content, and exists because someone chose to put it there.
- Count referring domains (different sites linking to you), not total backlinks.
- The fastest links are usually the ones you’re already owed: partners, suppliers, mentions without a link, and old links pointing at pages that are now 404.
- Skip link lists, directory blasts, web 2.0s, tiered links and cheap packages. Google ignores that stuff (at best).
First, make sure backlinks are actually your problem
Backlinks still matter, quite possibly the most out of all ranking factors. Google’s own ranking systems guide says PageRank, the link-based system Google launched their search engine with, is still part of its core ranking systems. Its How Search Works page says that prominent sites linking to your content is generally a good sign the information is trustworthy.
That’s the main thing links do for you. They’re the biggest part of what SEOs call off-page SEO: signals that come from other sites vouching for yours. They also help Google find your pages, and the good ones send you real visitors.
But they’re not necessarily the magic lever people make them out to be. Gary Illyes, an analyst on Google’s Search team, said at a Pubcon conference that people “overestimate the importance of links,” that links haven’t been a top three ranking factor for some time, and that it’s possible to rank without them.
Now I would not fully agree with Gary here. We all know Google loves to tell a lie or two. But what is 100% true is that links are one of the ways Google decides who to trust, but they can’t alone pull up a page that doesn’t answer the search well.
Ahrefs’ look at about 14 billion pages shows the same thing. 96.55% of pages get zero traffic from Google, and the three main reasons Ahrefs gave are: the topic has no search demand, the page has no backlinks, or the page doesn’t match what people searching actually want.
Links are one of three.
So before you spend a month on outreach, rule out the other two. Search your keyword and open the top five results. If those pages are clearly better answers than yours (more complete, a better match for what the searcher wants, easier to use), fix your page first.
If your page is as good or better and the pages ranking have far more sites linking to them, links are your gap.
What a backlink that moves rankings looks like
A backlink (also called an inbound link, same thing) is a link from another website to yours. They’re not all equal, and most of the confusion about link building comes from treating them like they are. People see it as a game where the more you acquire, the better off you are. It’s why indie hackers get stuck on gaming the DR (domain rating) in Ahrefs, like it’s a metric that does anything for their website’s rankings.
The best test I know for any link: would it still exist if Google didn’t?
If a site linked to you because their readers would find your page useful, that’s a link Google wants to count. That’s what people mean by natural link building. If the only reason a link exists is to push your rankings, Google’s spam policies have a name for it: link spam.
Past that test, the links that move rankings usually check most of these boxes:
| What to look for | Why it matters |
| The site or a page covers your topic, or your customers read it | Relevance is what makes the link a vote for your page on that topic |
| The site gets real traffic from Google | A site Google sends no traffic to is usually a site Google doesn’t think much of |
| Someone chose to add it | This is what an editorial link is. A writer or editor linked to you because it made their page better |
| It sits inside the content | Contextual links in the body of an article are the ones readers see and click. Footer, sidebar and profile links are mostly boilerplate |
| It’s a followed link | Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc links as hints, so they may not count |
| The anchor text reads naturally | Anchors stuffed with keywords look manufactured, because they usually are |
| It’s a new site linking to you | The tenth link from the same site adds far less than the first |
A link that checks most of those boxes is what people mean by a high-quality backlink, whatever a tool’s score says about it.
Count referring domains, not backlinks
A referring domain is a website that links to you. Backlinks are the total number of links. One site can link to you a thousand times from its footer and it’s still one referring domain.
The gap between the two numbers can get huge. Ahrefs’ own free backlink checker page is a good example: when I checked it recently, it had close to 6 million live backlinks, all coming from 4,877 referring domains.
Referring domains are the number to watch. Backlinko’s analysis of 11.8 million search results found the #1 result has about 3x more referring domains than results #2 to #10. That’s a correlation, so don’t read it as a formula, but it’s why every SEO tool puts referring domains front and center.
DA, DR and PA aren’t Google metrics
Domain Authority (DA) is a score developed by Moz that runs from 0 to 100 and predicts how well a site might rank, based mostly on its links. Page Authority (PA) is the same idea for a single page.
Ahrefs has its own version called Domain Rating (DR), and Semrush has Authority Score.
Google doesn’t use any of them. John Mueller from Google has said Google doesn’t have anything like a website authority score. These are each tool’s estimate, built from that tool’s own link data.
They’re still handy as a rough filter. A DR 5 site with no traffic probably won’t do much for you. But chasing “high DA backlinks” is how people end up paying for links on big, irrelevant sites that sell posts to anyone. I’d take a link from a small, well-run site in my niche over a DA 80 site that publishes casino guides next to banana bread recipes.
Dofollow vs nofollow links
By default, a link is followed, which means it can pass ranking value. Site owners can add rel=”nofollow”, rel=”sponsored” (for paid links) or rel=”ugc” (for user-generated content like comments and forum posts) to tell Google not to count it as a vote.
Since 2019, Google treats all three as hints rather than strict rules, so a nofollow link might still get some credit. I wouldn’t plan around that, however. When you’re deciding where to spend your time, assume followed links are the ones that move rankings and treat nofollow links as a way to get traffic and get seen.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. Google says it should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant, and it’s explicit that keyword stuffing is a spam policy violation.
Most of the time you don’t control the anchor anyway, and you shouldn’t try to. Most natural links use your brand name or a short description of the page. If every link to your page says “best plumber in Austin,” that pattern looks exactly like what it is.
How many backlinks do you need, and how long do they take?
You need roughly as many referring domains as the pages or websites already ranking for what you want to rank (but ideally more). There’s no universal number, but you can find yours in about ten minutes:
- Search your keyword and note the top five organic results.
- Put each URL (the page, not the whole domain) into a backlink checker. Ahrefs’ free backlink checker is enough for this.
- Write down the number of referring domains for each page.
- Ignore the outliers (Wikipedia, Amazon, huge brands) and look at the range of the rest.
If the pages ranking have 5 to 15 referring domains each, that’s a realistic target for a few months of work. If they have 400, a handful of links won’t get you there, and you’re better off going after a less competitive keyword first.
How many backlinks per month is safe?
Nobody knows a safe number, and I don’t think one exists. What gets sites in trouble is where links come from as well as the patterns of linking that are obviously link manipulation in Google’s eyes.
A sudden pile of 300 links from junk sites is a problem because of the sites, and the number just makes it easier to spot.
What we do know is that pages at the top keep earning. Ahrefs tracked 200,000 top-ranking pages and found #1 results gain links from new sites at a pace of 5% to 14.5% per month. Rankings bring visibility, and visibility brings more links.
So forget monthly or daily quotas. Aim for a page good enough, and visible enough, that it keeps picking up links after you stop outreaching.
How long do backlinks take to work?
Expect weeks at minimum, and usually months. Google has to recrawl the page linking to you and process the change, and then your page still has to beat everything else on the results page.
Ahrefs’ study on ranking timelines is sobering. Only 1.74% of newly published pages reached the top 10 within a year, and 72.9% of pages in the top 10 are more than three years old. Links help you close that gap faster. They don’t let you skip it.
There’s no clean study on how long a single link takes to show up in rankings, and I doubt anyone could run one, because it’s nearly impossible to isolate one link from everything else changing on a page.
One more thing people ask is how to get backlinks indexed fast. You’ll see “link indexer” services that promise to force Google to index the pages linking to you. If Google won’t index a page on its own, that usually tells you the page, and the link on it, isn’t worth much.
Real links on real sites get crawled without help.
9 ways to get backlinks that actually work
These go from least effort to most. If you’re starting from zero, work through them top to bottom.
1. Ask for the links you’re already owed
Most businesses have a pile of links they’ve already earned and never collected. Think about who you work with:
- suppliers and manufacturers with a “where to buy” or “partners” page
- software and tools you use that publish customer stories
- clients who’d happily mention you on their site
- associations, local groups and events you’re part of, sponsor or speak at
- anyone who’s written about you without linking
That last group has a name: unlinked brand mentions. Set up a free Google Alerts notification for your brand name (or use the mentions feature in Ahrefs or Semrush if you already pay for one), and when someone mentions you without a link, send a short, friendly note asking if they’d add one.
They already like you enough to mention you. The ask is small.
2. Fix the backlinks you’ve already lost
Links break all the time. Ahrefs looked at links pointing to over 2 million websites and found 66.5% of links built since 2013 have rotted away.
Some of those dead links point at you. Every redesign, migration or URL change without proper redirects turned good backlinks into links to a 404 page, and a link to a 404 page doesn’t help the rest of your site.
To find them, open the broken backlinks report in your backlink tool, or check Pages > Not found (404) in Google Search Console and look those URLs up in your backlink tool. Then 301 redirect each dead URL that has links to the closest live page. This is called link reclamation, and I’d do it before any outreach, because these are links you already earned once.
3. Be the source journalists quote
Journalists and bloggers need expert quotes every day, and there are platforms built to connect them with sources. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) was the big one for years. Cision rebranded it, shut it down, and in April 2025 sold it to Featured.com, which brought it back. Qwoted and Featured are the two I’d sign up for.
What gets you picked:
- Answer the same day. Popular requests fill up fast.
- Answer the exact question, with a specific number, example or opinion they can quote.
- Only pitch where you actually know the topic. A plumber quoted in a home maintenance article is a great link. A plumber quoted in a crypto article isn’t.
Podcasts work the same way. Shows need guests, the show notes usually link to the guest’s site, and being on a podcast your customers listen to is worth it even without the link.
4. Guest post for sites your customers actually read
Guest posting (writing an article for someone else’s site) still works if you do it for a site your customers read, on a topic you know, with a link that makes sense where it sits.
Google has been clear about where guest posting crosses the line. Its warning about article campaigns lists the signs: keyword-rich links stuffed into the articles, the same articles spread across lots of sites, writers who don’t know the topic, and reused content. If you’re paying for posts on sites with a “write for us” page and 400 articles on 400 unrelated topics, that’s the campaign Google is describing.
When you pitch, pitch an idea. “I’d like to write a guest post for you” is easy to ignore. “Your post on first home costs doesn’t cover closing fees, and I can write that piece with real numbers from our last 50 closings” is much harder to ignore.
You also don’t need guest posts at all. Every other tactic on this list works without them, so if you hate writing for other people, skip this one.
5. Make one thing worth linking to
People link to things they can cite or use: original data, a free tool or calculator, a template, a resource that’s actually complete. Most business content is none of those, which is why it doesn’t earn links on its own.
The Ahrefs study I cited earlier, the one about 96.55% of pages getting no traffic, is a good example. When I checked it in September 2026, 3,730 different websites were still linking to it. Hardly anyone links to “10 SEO tips for 2026.” They link to the page with the number in it.
You don’t need Ahrefs’ budget. A few scrappier versions:
- survey your customers and publish the results
- turn your own numbers into a benchmark (average project costs, lead times, prices in your area)
- build a simple calculator or checklist for a question your customers ask all the time
- make a chart or image people want to reuse, and ask for a credit link when they do
When a bigger version of this gets pitched to journalists as a story, agencies call it digital PR.
The chart version used to be called infographic link building. Mass-producing infographics and emailing them to everyone is mostly done. A useful chart still gets picked up, though, and someone using your image without credit is a perfect reason to ask for the link.
6. Replace broken links on resource pages
Lots of sites keep resource pages: “useful links for new homeowners,” “tools we recommend,” “further reading.” Given the link rot number above, plenty of those pages are full of dead links, and the owners usually don’t know.
Find them with searches like plumbing “useful resources” or inurl:resources your topic, then run each page through a broken link checker (the free Check My Links Chrome extension does it).
When you find a dead link to something you’ve also covered, send the owner a note with the broken link and your working page as a replacement. That’s broken link building (resource page link building is the same idea aimed at those pages specifically). You’re fixing their page first and asking second.
7. Look at who links to your competitors
Your competitors already did the research on where links in your niche come from. Put two or three competitor domains into a link gap tool (Ahrefs calls it Link Intersect, Semrush calls it Backlink Gap) and look for sites that link to at least two of them but not to you.
Most of what you’ll find is junk. Mixed in, you’ll find links you can actually replicate: “best of” lists, industry directories, podcasts, partner pages, local news, reviews.
Those sites already link to businesses like yours, which makes your ask a lot easier.
8. Get listed where your customers actually look
A handful of directories are worth being on such as your local chamber of commerce, industry associations, and the directories your customers actually use to find businesses like yours.
For agencies and marketers, that’s marketing directories like Clutch. For home services, it’s places like Houzz. Most industries have a trade-specific one. If a real customer might browse it, get listed.
That’s a different thing from “directory submission,” where you blast your site to hundreds of generic directories nobody visits.
For local businesses, these listings do double duty: they’re relevant links, and they back up your business details for local search.
9. Show up where people talk
Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, YouTube, Medium, Pinterest, Facebook, X… almost every link you post on these platforms is nofollow or ugc. They won’t move your rankings directly, and dropping your links everywhere gets you banned from subreddits and ignored everywhere else.
The value is who’s there. Journalists, bloggers and site owners hang out on these platforms, and a helpful Reddit answer or a good YouTube video puts you in front of the people who can link to you from their own sites.
There’s a second reason in 2026 as well and it’s called AI search. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that brand mentions across the web had a much stronger correlation with showing up in Google’s AI Overviews (0.664) than the number of backlinks did (0.218).
It’s a correlation, of course (like everything in SEO) but it lines up with what you’d expect – getting talked about, even without a link, seems to count for something on its own now.
One thing I’d skip is trying to get a link from Wikipedia. Its external links are nofollow, editors remove self-promotional edits, and it’s not worth the fight.
How to ask for a link without getting ignored
Let’s be honest. Most outreach fails. Backlinko and Pitchbox analyzed 12 million outreach emails and found only 8.5% got a reply, and a reply isn’t a link, either, by the way.
The same study shows what helps, too. One follow-up raised replies by 65.8%, and personalizing the body of the email lifted them by 32.7%. So send fewer emails, make each one specific, and follow up once.
A good link request:
- shows you read their page (name it)
- points to the exact spot where your link would help
- explains what their reader gets from your page
- doesn’t offer a link swap or money ideally
Can AI build backlinks for you? It can help with the grunt work like finding prospects, sorting lists, drafting a first version of a pitch. It can’t make anyone want to link to you.
Hundreds of AI-written pitches sent to scraped inboxes is still spam, just with better grammar, and editors get a pile of them every day.
Point your links at the right pages
A backlink helps the page it points to the most. If every link you earn goes to your homepage, the service page or category page you actually want to rank only gets whatever your internal links pass down to it.
That’s fine, as long as it’s on purpose. Tools, data and guides earn links far more easily than a sales page ever will. So earn links to those pages, then link from them to your money pages with clear, descriptive internal links.
Internal linking is the part people skip the most. It’s the whole problem Linkter, the WordPress internal linking tool I co-founded, was built to solve. After you earn a link, open the page it points to and make sure it links to the one or two pages you most want to rank. It takes five minutes and it’s what turns a link that helps one blog post into a link that helps your business.
What doesn’t work anymore (and what can hurt you)
If you’ve searched for how to get backlinks before, you’ve seen most of these. They worked at some point, which is why the advice keeps floating around. Google has spent years learning to ignore them.
| Tactic | Why people did it | What happens now |
| Free backlink site lists: directory, article, social bookmarking, profile and web submission sites | Easy links in bulk | Sites nobody visits, links nobody chose. Ignored at best. |
| Web 2.0 blogs (free Blogspot, WordPress.com or Tumblr sites) | Free subdomains on “high authority” platforms | You’re linking to yourself from a site nobody reads |
| Blog comment and forum signature links | Fast and free | Nofollow or ugc, and they mark you as a spammer |
| Tiered link building | Build junk links to your links to “power them up” | More junk, more risk |
| PBNs (private blog networks) | Control your own links | Exactly what Google’s spam systems are built to find |
| “High PR” or “PR5 to PR10” backlinks | PageRank scores from the old Google Toolbar | Google removed Toolbar PageRank in 2016, so anyone selling “PR8 links” is selling a number that no longer exists |
| .edu and .gov link packages | Those domains “must be trusted” | A link from a forgotten student page is still a link from a forgotten page |
| Cheap packages (“50 DA 50+ links for $99”) | Cheap and fast | Usually everything above, bundled |
| Link indexers | Force Google to see your links | If Google won’t index the page, the link wasn’t worth much |
Once Google catches spammy links, the benefit is gone for good. Its spam update documentation says that when its systems remove the effect of spammy links, any ranking benefit they gave you is lost and cannot be regained. Even when junk links don’t get you penalized, you paid for something that got switched off.
Most of the time, Google just ignores these links. The bigger risk is a manual action, where someone at Google reviews your site and penalizes it. That’s rarer, but it happens, and recovering from one is slow (and most often even downright impossible).
Should you buy backlinks?
Paid links are fine only if they’re marked with rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow”, according to Google.
However, people buy links all the time, and some of those sites rank. You just don’t hear about the ones whose paid links got switched off, or the ones that got a manual action, so know that this carries risk but can absolutely work if done correctly. Done correctly, being the keywords here.
You should also know it’s not cheap either. When Ahrefs priced it out by contacting hundreds of sites, guest posts averaged $77.80 and niche edits (paying to add your link to an existing article) averaged $361.44. Multiply that by the number of referring domains you found in the benchmark above, and you’re looking at thousands for links that can stop counting at any point.
My opinion is that if you have money to put into links, put it into something that earns them. Original research, a free tool, a good PR story, or a person’s time doing real outreach. Those keep working after you stop paying.
If you’re hiring a link building service
Cheap SEO is usually the expensive option, and link building is where that shows up fastest. (I went deeper on this in my eCommerce SEO cost breakdown.)
Red flags:
- a price list by DA or DR (“DA 50+ link: $150”)
- a guaranteed number of links per month
- a list of sites they “have access to”
- reports that count links delivered and nothing else
Good signs:
- they show you real outreach and the pages they’re pitching
- they talk about relevance and which of your pages need links
- they report the metrics that matter such as referring domains, rankings and organic traffic for the pages they built links to
- they tell you when links aren’t your problem
What to do about toxic backlinks
Every site picks up junk links over time from scraper sites, strange directories, pages that copy half the internet. You didn’t build them and you can’t stop them for the most part.
Google mostly handles it for you. Its own disavow tool documentation says that in most cases Google can work out which links to trust on its own, and that most sites will not need the tool.
Google only recommends disavowing when you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links and they’ve caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action.
The “toxic score” warnings in SEO tools are the tool’s guess, not Google’s, so keep that in mind. I wouldn’t disavow anything based on a score alone.
You should clean up your backlink profile if:
- you (or an agency you hired) bought links or ran a link scheme, or
- you got a manual action for unnatural links in Search Console (under Security & Manual Actions)
In that case, ask the sites to remove the bad backlinks first, disavow whatever’s left, and if you had a manual action, file a reconsideration request once it’s done.
Two more questions people ask
Can you get backlinks for free?
Yes. Everything in the list of nine costs time, not money. The only thing you might pay for is a backlink tool, and the free checkers from Ahrefs and Semrush, plus the Links report in Google Search Console, cover the basics.
Do backlinks still matter in 2026?
For anything competitive, yes. Links are still a huge part of how Google decides who to trust, and being mentioned around the web is now tied to showing up in AI answers too.
What’s changed is that Google got better at ignoring shortcuts, so the only link building worth doing is the kind that would make sense even without Google.