How Many Types of Link Building Are There?
Eight categories, written so you can place whatever has just been proposed to you into one of them. Each has a cost, a timescale and a level of risk. Knowing which you are being sold is what makes two quotes comparable.
Why The Categories Matter To A Buyer
The same activity gets described half a dozen different ways depending on who is selling it. Authority building, content seeding, brand amplification, digital outreach, link acquisition: these are not eight services. Several of them are the same thing with different words in front of it.
That is why comparing two proposals is so difficult. One says digital PR and one says content marketing. There is no way to tell whether they describe identical work at different prices or completely different work at the same price. The vocabulary obscures rather than clarifies, sometimes deliberately and often just from habit.
Categories fix that. If you can place a proposal into one of the eight below, you immediately know roughly what it should cost, how long it should take, how predictable the outcome is and what risk it carries. You can then ask the only question that matters, which is why this category rather than another for a business like mine.
The categories are ordered here roughly from most durable to least, with the final one sitting outside the list for reasons the block explains. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building. The discipline itself is defined in what link building is.
Earned Links
Somebody referenced you without being asked, because something on your site was worth pointing at. Nobody negotiated and nobody was contacted.
What it involves. Producing something genuinely useful then waiting. Original explanations of things people misunderstand, tools, data, resources practitioners in your field would keep a note of. The work is entirely on your own site, which is why it does not look like link building at all.
Timescale. Months before anything, then indefinitely afterwards. A page that keeps being useful keeps collecting references with no further effort, which is what makes this category compound.
Predictability. None. That is not a criticism, it is the definition. Earned means somebody else decided, so nobody can forecast it.
Risk. Nil. There is nothing to detect, because nothing was arranged.
The commercial consequence is worth stating plainly, because it explains a lot about how this industry behaves. No supplier can sell you earned links, since selling implies delivering and nobody controls the decisions involved. What a supplier can sell is the work that makes earning more likely. Any proposal claiming to deliver earned links to a schedule has misnamed the category. The real category is probably further down this page.
Editorial Outreach
Approaching a real publication with a genuine reason to be included. Not a placement request, a proposal that something belongs in front of their readers.
What it involves. Identifying publications that actually cover your field, understanding what each one publishes, then approaching the right person with something specific to that publication. The work is mostly research and judgement rather than volume.
Timescale. Weeks to months per relationship. The relationships are the asset. A publication that has run one thing from you is far more likely to run a second.
Predictability. Low on any individual approach and moderate across a programme. The realistic expectation is that the large majority of approaches produce nothing at all. That is the normal condition rather than evidence of poor execution. We are deliberately not quoting a success rate, because any figure you see for this depends entirely on how the sender defined an approach. Nobody publishes their method.
Risk. Nil where the approach is genuine, since the outcome is an editorial decision. Risk enters only when outreach becomes a mechanism for arranging placements, at which point the category has changed.
This is the category most often confused with the next one. The distinction is that editorial outreach starts with a publication and asks what would suit it, while coverage led work starts with a story and asks who would want it.
Digital PR
Coverage led work. Something genuinely newsworthy exists. It goes to publications that might report it. Links arrive as a by-product of the coverage rather than as the objective.
What it involves. Original research, data from your own operations, a genuine event or expert comment on something currently being discussed. The story has to come first, which is the constraint that separates this from everything else.
Timescale. A campaign runs over weeks. Coverage either lands or does not. When it lands the links are usually strong.
Predictability. Low on any single story and reasonable across a programme, provided the stories are real.
Risk. Nil in the genuine version. The failure mode is not risk but waste: a story with no news in it produces coverage in publications nobody reads.
Cost. The most expensive category here, because it requires research, production and somebody who knows the publications.
This category is taken apart properly in our guide to how brand mentions support backlink authority, including the four questions that tell you whether a proposal is genuinely coverage led or a placement programme wearing its clothes.
Guest Contribution
Writing something that appears on somebody else's site. One phrase covering two activities that could hardly be less alike, which is why it needs its own page rather than a paragraph.
The legitimate version. Contributing genuine expertise to a publication in your field because you have something to say and an editor wants it. Trade publishing has worked this way for decades. The link is incidental.
The other version. Volume placements on sites that exist to host contributions, sold by the link, often written by somebody with no knowledge of the subject. Same phrase, entirely different activity, materially different risk.
The two are distinguishable from the outside. The tests are practical rather than technical. Does the site publish anything not supplied by contributors hoping for a link? Does it have editorial standards and somebody applying them? Would you be pleased to be seen there?
Because the risk profile splits so sharply between the two versions, this category gets its own treatment in what guest posting is. If an agency has proposed it to you, read that before agreeing anything.
Directories, Listings And Memberships
Trade bodies, professional registers, accreditation schemes, chambers of commerce, genuine sector directories. Individually modest, collectively useful, generally cheap and entirely legitimate.
What it involves. An application, sometimes a fee, occasionally proof of qualifications or insurance. Frequently a membership you already hold and have never checked.
Timescale. Days to weeks. The fastest legitimate category available.
Predictability. High. You either meet the criteria or you do not.
Risk. Nil for genuine bodies. Real for the imitations, which is what the rest of this block is about.
Telling a genuine directory from something built to sell links is a practical exercise. Five questions settle it. Does it have entry requirements beyond payment? Does it list any organisation that did not pay to be there? Is there a human being who can be contacted about a listing? Does it serve an identifiable sector, profession or place rather than accepting everybody? Would one of your customers plausibly use it to find a supplier?
A genuine trade register answers yes to all five without effort. Something built to host links struggles with the first and the last, which are the two that matter most. If the only qualification for inclusion is a payment, with no buyer who would ever consult it, you are not looking at a directory.
Resource And Replacement Approaches
Two related approaches that both depend on already having something worth pointing at.
Resource inclusion. Many sites maintain pages listing useful sources on a subject: a university department listing industry references, a professional body listing reading, an association listing tools its members use. Asking to be considered for such a page is legitimate and occasionally successful, provided what you have genuinely belongs there.
Replacement. Pages link to things that stop existing. Sites close, resources move and documents are withdrawn. The pages referencing them are left pointing at nothing. Where you have something that genuinely serves the purpose the missing item served, telling the site owner is doing them a small favour as well as yourself.
Timescale and predictability. Slow and low. Both depend on somebody maintaining a page and caring enough to edit it, which many do not.
Risk. Nil, because both are requests rather than arrangements.
What both categories suit is a business that already has a genuinely good resource and wants it seen. What neither suits is a business hoping to generate links without having built anything, since both approaches require something to point at before they can begin. That is the recurring theme of this whole taxonomy: the categories that carry no risk all depend on the same prerequisite.
Relationships You Already Have
The most overlooked category in this list and usually the cheapest available to any established business. Nothing here requires outreach, content or a budget, because the relationship already exists.
Suppliers and manufacturers. Approved installer pages, certified partner listings, stockist finders, distributor directories. If you sell or fit somebody's product, they may well have a page listing businesses that do.
Clients. A customer willing to appear in a case study, perhaps to reference the work on their own site. Common in business to business trades and rarely asked for.
Partners and referral relationships. The firms you already send work to and receive work from, where a mutual reference reflects an actual working relationship rather than an arrangement.
Sponsorships you are already paying for. The club shirt, the local event, the charity partnership. Many businesses fund these for years without ever checking whether their name appears online.
Local organisations. Chambers, business groups, schools and community bodies you are genuinely involved with.
Timescale is days. Predictability is high because these people already know you. Risk is nil provided the reference reflects something real. The test that keeps this category clean is whether the relationship would exist if search engines did not. For everything listed above the answer is obviously yes.
Paid Placement, And Why It Sits Outside
Paying somebody specifically so that a link appears. It is named here because you will be offered it, frequently, under names designed not to sound like this. It is described rather than explained. This page contains no information about where such arrangements are found or what they cost.
What it is. Money changing hands for the link itself, rather than for a membership, a sponsorship, an advertisement or a piece of work that happens to carry one. The distinguishing question is always what the payment was for.
Why it sits outside the taxonomy. Google's published guidance identifies paying for links that pass ranking signals as a violation of its policies. The other seven categories are things a business does. This is a thing a business buys. It is also the only one where the risk attaches to the buyer.
Why the risk is asymmetric. The site selling placements has a business model. If its links stop counting it sells to somebody else. The business that bought them has paid for an asset that can quietly stop working, with no notice and no refund. The exposure sits entirely on its side of the transaction.
How that exposure actually materialises, which is usually silent devaluation rather than a penalty notice, is set out in how Google detects unnatural backlink patterns. We do not offer this category.
Which Ones Suit Which Business
The categories are not equally available to everybody. Five common situations, with what actually fits.
A local business serving one area. Relationships you already have, plus memberships and genuine local organisations. Nothing further. Local ranking barely depends on links, so the rest of this taxonomy is a distraction and the money belongs elsewhere.
A new business with no budget. Relationships and memberships again, for the same reason: both are available immediately and cost time rather than money. Earned links are the long game to start alongside them.
An established firm in a competitive national market. The full range. Earned as the foundation, editorial outreach for depth, digital PR where there is genuinely something to report, relationships and memberships as the cheap baseline.
A professional or regulated practice. Memberships and registers first, because those carry verification that nothing else in the list can. Then editorial outreach and being quoted as an expert. Digital PR only where the subject allows it.
A business with real proprietary data. Digital PR is unusually well suited, because the hardest part of that category is having something to report and you already do.
On timescale: memberships and relationships pay within weeks, outreach and PR within months, earned links over years. On budget: the first two categories cost almost nothing, PR costs the most. Whether any of it is the right spend at all is the subject of how to get backlinks and the positioning page it points to.
Seven categories.
Not the eighth.
We work in the categories a business can account for: relationships you already hold, memberships and registers, resources worth citing, editorial approaches to real publications. No purchased placements, no networks, no price per link.
Included every month:
One fixed monthly rate. No setup fee. No price per link.
Twenty four guides.
One subject.
This page covers the categories. The rest of the series covers what makes a link valuable, how patterns are detected, what guest posting has become, what to ask before buying and when links are not the right spend.
