How to Earn Links

The most sustainable way to get backlinks is to create content worth linking to. This sounds simple, but it means producing something genuinely useful that other writers and publishers will want to reference: original research, a comprehensive guide, a free tool, a dataset, or a clear explanation of something that is poorly covered elsewhere.

Other practical approaches include digital PR (getting your data or expert commentary mentioned in news articles), guest posting on relevant industry sites, and finding pages that link to outdated or broken resources and suggesting your content as a replacement, a tactic called broken link building.

What to avoid: buying links, participating in link schemes, or using private blog networks. Google actively penalizes these tactics, and the risk of a manual penalty that tanks your entire site’s rankings is not worth any short-term gain.

A brand mention without a link, sometimes called a linkless backlink, now counts for something too. Google’s natural language processing can recognize and credit a consistent brand mention even with no hyperlink attached, and AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity rely on this same broad pattern of recognition across credible sources when deciding what to cite. This doesn’t replace backlinks, but it means being mentioned in relevant industry articles, expert roundups, and comparison pieces is worth real effort even when no link comes with it.

Digital PR today looks less like writing a single guest post for one link, and more like earning genuine citations, interviews, and features. Original research or a proprietary dataset gives a journalist or publication a real reason to cover you, and appearing in "best of" or comparison content on a genuinely authoritative third-party site tends to influence whether AI systems cite you for related queries more than an equivalent link from a less relevant source.