Editorial & Outreach Link Building
The gold standard: manually pitching real sites for a genuine, earned placement — most commonly through guest posting, or by offering a journalist a quote, data point, or expert comment (see our HARO and digital PR guide). Slower than automated methods, but the only category that reliably survives algorithm updates and manual review.
Resource Page Link Building
Many sites maintain a "resources" or "useful links" page curating helpful external content on a topic. Resource link building means finding these pages and pitching your own genuinely relevant page for inclusion. It's sustainable because the site owner is actively looking to add value for readers — you're not asking for a favor, you're offering one.
Directory Link Building
Submitting your site to industry or local business directories. Largely low-value for general SEO today, but still relevant for local SEO — a handful of reputable, niche-specific directories (not mass link-farm directories) can genuinely help local pack visibility. Volume here is not the goal; relevance is.
Tiered Link Building
A structure where "tier 2" links point to your "tier 1" backlinks (rather than directly to your site), intended to boost the authority of those tier-1 links. It's a legitimate concept in theory, but in practice tier-2 links are almost always low-quality and automated, which drags the whole structure toward black-hat territory. We don't run tiered campaigns for clients.
What to Avoid: PBNs & Automated Link Building
A few tactics promise fast, cheap backlinks — and each carries real risk to your site:
- PBNs (private blog networks) — a group of sites, often on expired domains, secretly owned by one operator solely to link to their money sites. Google actively hunts PBN patterns, and deindexing an entire network — along with everything it linked to — happens regularly.
- Automated & auto link building tools — software (including GSA-style tools) that mass-submits your site to directories, forums, and comment sections automatically. Speed comes at the cost of quality: these links sit on low-relevance, low-traffic pages.
- Organic/SEO backlink generators — services claiming to generate backlinks "organically" through automation. If a tool can generate a link without human outreach or editorial review, it's not an editorial link — it's a low-quality one with a better marketing name.
Toxic backlinks from any of the above don't just fail to help — they can actively hurt you. If you've used automated tools in the past, a link audit and disavow process should come before any new campaign.
Which Strategy Should You Actually Use?
For almost every business, a blend of editorial outreach and resource-page pitching — done manually, on vetted sites — outperforms every automated shortcut over any timeframe longer than a few months. The tactics that feel slow are the ones that survive the next Google update.