How Do You Get Backlinks?
Sorted by effort against durability, because that is the trade nobody states out loud. The quick methods are the risky ones. The methods that last are slow. Knowing which you are being offered is most of what a buyer needs.
What Getting A Backlink Actually Involves
A backlink exists because somebody who does not work for you decided to point at your website. That is the whole mechanism. You cannot create one on your own site, you cannot instruct anybody to give you one and there is no process that guarantees one. Every method on this page is a way of making that decision more likely.
Hold that constraint in mind and most of the industry becomes legible. If a supplier promises a fixed number of links by a fixed date, they are promising decisions that other people have not made yet. There are only three ways to deliver on a promise like that. Get very lucky. Count things that were never editorial decisions in the first place. Pay somebody to make the decision for money.
It also explains why this work is slow in a way that frustrates businesses used to buying media. Advertising is a transaction. A link is somebody else's judgement. Judgements arrive on their own timetable.
The rest of this guide sorts the methods by two things nobody puts side by side: how much effort each takes and how long the result survives. The pattern is consistent enough to state up front. Anything fast is fragile or risky. Anything durable is slow. If the definitions are new to you, start with what link building is. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building.
Earned, Given And Bought
Every link falls into one of three categories. Learning to place a proposal into the right one is the single most useful skill a buyer of this service can develop, because the industry describes all three using the same vocabulary.
Earned. Somebody found something on your site worth citing and linked to it without being asked. Nobody negotiated. These are the most valuable, the least predictable and the impossible ones to promise. A supplier cannot sell you earned links. They can only make earning them more likely.
Given. A link that exists because of a relationship or a request. A supplier lists you as a stockist. A trade body lists you as a member. A publication accepts a contribution and credits you. You asked. Alternatively the relationship implied it. Somebody then said yes on the merits. This is where almost all deliverable link work actually happens.
Bought. Money changed hands specifically to place the link. This is the category Google's guidance identifies as a violation. It carries risk to the site receiving the link rather than to the site selling it. We do not do this work and this page does not explain how it is arranged.
The line that matters sits between the second and third categories. It is not always where people assume. Paying a trade association a membership fee that happens to include a directory entry is not buying a link, because the membership is the thing being bought. Paying somebody purely so that a link appears is, whatever the invoice calls it. The test is what the money is actually for. Our guide to how Google detects unnatural backlink patterns covers why the third category carries the risk it does.
The Methods That Work
Seven approaches that produce links a business can keep. Each one gets the same three questions: what it takes, how long it lasts, who it suits.
Being genuinely worth citing
The one everything else depends on. Something on your site has to be either the best available answer to a question people in your field ask or a resource somebody would reach for. It takes real subject knowledge and months of writing. It lasts indefinitely, because a page that keeps being useful keeps attracting references without further work. It suits any business with actual expertise and the patience to put it in public. It suits nobody looking for a result this quarter.
Original data and research
Publishing something nobody else has: survey results, aggregated figures from your own operations, an analysis of a dataset in your sector. It takes effort and a willingness to share numbers competitors will read. It lasts for years, since data gets cited long after publication and each citation is a new link. It suits businesses sitting on information nobody outside can access, which is more of them than realise it.
Supplier and partner relationships
Manufacturers listing approved installers, wholesalers listing stockists, software vendors listing certified partners, franchisors listing branches. It takes an email to somebody you already trade with. It lasts as long as the relationship. It suits nearly every business with a supply chain. It is also the most under-claimed category in this list: most firms have several of these available and unclaimed right now.
Trade bodies and memberships
Professional registers, accreditation schemes, industry associations, chambers of commerce. It takes a membership you may already hold. It lasts while the membership does. It suits regulated and skilled trades particularly, because these links carry meaning a general directory cannot: they corroborate that somebody checked you.
Local and community involvement
Sponsorships, charity partnerships, school and club support, local events. It takes money or time you may already be spending. It lasts while the page does, which for a club or charity is often years. It suits businesses with a physical presence and a community around them. Worth noting: many firms already sponsor something and have never asked whether their name appears online.
Industry directories people actually use
Not link farms. Directories that real buyers in your sector consult before choosing a supplier. It takes an application and sometimes a fee. It lasts while the listing does. It suits sectors where such a directory genuinely exists, which is fewer than the industry pretends. The test is whether a customer would use it to find you.
Being quoted as an expert
Journalists and trade publications need people who know things. Being available and useful when asked produces citations over time. It takes responsiveness and genuine knowledge. It lasts as long as the article stays online. It suits anybody with credentials or unusual operational insight. It compounds too, because being quoted once makes being quoted again more likely.
Outreach, And Why Most Of It Fails
Outreach means approaching somebody and asking them to link to you. It is the mechanism behind most of the given category. The overwhelming majority of it is ignored. Understanding why is more useful than any script.
Consider the position of the person receiving it. An editor at a trade publication gets dozens of these a week, most of them from people who have never read the publication, offering content that was written to contain a link rather than to be read. The request is usually flattering in a way that reveals it was sent to hundreds of people. Nothing in it suggests the sender knows what the publication covers.
From that side of the desk the calculation is quick. Answering costs time. The overwhelming majority of these approaches offer nothing the publication wants. So the default is to ignore. That default is correct, which is why volume approaches keep failing while the people sending them conclude they simply need to send more.
What makes a request worth answering is not a technique. It is that the thing being offered is genuinely of use to that publication's readers, that it comes from somebody who plainly knows the field and that the sender is offering rather than extracting. A person who can explain why a specific piece belongs in a specific publication has already done the work that separates them from the pile.
This page deliberately stops at principle rather than becoming a playbook, because a playbook for volume approaches is exactly what produced the pile in the first place.
Ongoing Work Against One-Off Campaigns
Link work gets sold in two shapes. A campaign is a defined burst with a start and an end. Ongoing work is a continuing workstream inside a monthly programme. They produce genuinely different results and the difference is not the total number of links.
A campaign produces a spike. Something happens, coverage or placements arrive over a few weeks, then the graph flattens. If the campaign had a real reason behind it, the links that came from it persist and keep working. What stops is the arrival of new ones.
Ongoing work produces a slope. Fewer links in any given month, arriving continuously, on a site that is also publishing things worth citing. The profile grows in a shape that looks like a business becoming better known rather than like a business that hired somebody in March.
Each shape suits something. A campaign fits a genuine event: a launch, a new location, a piece of research, a story that actually is news. Ongoing work fits the general case of a business that wants to keep competing.
The point worth making plainly is that a campaign with no follow through frequently reads worse than no campaign at all. A cluster of links arriving in one short window and then nothing for two years is a distinctive shape. It is the shape of arranged activity rather than growing reputation. A business that runs one burst and stops has produced the pattern without the reputation it was meant to represent. Our guide to how Google detects unnatural backlink patterns explains why shape matters more than volume.
Doing It Without A Budget
A business with no budget for this is not shut out. It is limited to the categories that cost time rather than money. Several of those are the good ones anyway.
Claim what already exists. Suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers, franchisors, accreditation bodies, professional registers, anything you already pay to belong to, anything you already sponsor. This is a list of emails rather than a project. Most businesses find several unclaimed entries. It is the highest return work available at zero cost.
Ask the people who already rate you. Long standing clients willing to appear in a case study, partners you refer work to, the local organisation whose event you supported last year. None of this is outreach in the cold sense, because the relationship already exists.
Be findable when somebody needs an expert. Responding usefully to a journalist or a trade publication costs nothing except attention and the willingness to answer quickly.
Write the thing only you could write. The one genuinely free method with no ceiling. If you know something your competitors do not bother to explain, putting it in public is available to anybody with an evening a week.
Where that runs out is worth stating rather than glossing. Time cannot buy the things that need money: research at any scale, design, a publication relationship somebody has to maintain and the sustained effort of a programme running every month. A business doing this alone will get the cheap wins, then plateau. The plateau arrives sooner than expected. That is a reason to start rather than a reason not to.
How Many You Actually Need
We are not going to give you a number. The refusal is the useful part rather than an evasion. Anybody who does give you one has not looked at your situation, because every component of the answer is specific to it.
What the answer depends on. What the competitors already ranking have, since the target is a gap rather than an absolute. How relevant your existing profile is, because ten links from your own field can outweigh a hundred from nowhere. How contested the terms are, which varies enormously between subjects. Whether your pages deserve to rank on their own merits, since links amplify rather than substitute. And whether links are the constraint at all, which is the question underneath the question.
That last one deserves working through before any number is discussed. A quick way to approach it: look at whether your pages are being seen at all, look at whether the ones being seen are converting, then look at whether the competitors beating you are actually beating you on links rather than on relevance or on having answered the question better. If the pages are not being found, that is a technical or content problem. If they are being found and nobody enquires, that is a conversion problem. Links solve neither.
Only when pages are sound, relevant and being seen does a link deficit become the binding constraint. Our guide to when backlinks are not the right SEO investment works through that diagnosis properly. It is the page we would rather you read before commissioning any of this.
Common Mistakes
Five mistakes, in order of how much money they waste.
Chasing volume. Treating a link count as the objective. It produces exactly what it measures, which is a large number of links that do nothing. Those usually come from the sources that were easiest to obtain, for the obvious reason.
Buying on a metric. Selecting links by a third party score rather than by relevance and readership. The score is domain wide and predicts rather than causes, so it tells you almost nothing about the page your link would sit on.
Identical anchor text. The same commercial phrase used as the visible link words repeatedly across many sites. A natural profile does not look like that, because real people describe things in their own words.
One campaign then silence. Covered above. A burst with no continuation leaves the shape of arranged activity without the reputation it was supposed to signal.
Pursuing links while the site cannot convert. The most expensive of the five in real money. Every link earned sends visitors and standing to a page that loses them. Fixing the destination first costs less and makes everything afterwards worth more. What we actually do about all of this is set out in how we build backlinks for clients.
Slow methods,
run properly.
Claiming what you already have, building something worth citing, approaching publications that actually matter in your field. No purchased placements, no networks, no price per link. If links are not your constraint we will tell you that first.
Included every month:
One fixed monthly rate. No setup fee. No price per link.
Twenty four guides.
One subject.
This page covers the methods. The rest of the series covers what makes a link valuable, how patterns are detected, what a metric is worth, how to audit what you already have and when none of this is the right spend.
