Link building has always had a high turnover of tactics. Techniques that worked in 2018 — PBNs, guest post networks, link exchanges — are now net negative for most sites. The question that matters is which approaches have survived and continue to produce results worth measuring.

The honest answer is that the approaches that work are harder and slower than the approaches that used to work. That’s not a reason to avoid them. It’s a description of the competitive landscape.

The most durable link building tactic is also the most labour-intensive: produce data that other sites want to cite. Original research — surveys, proprietary data analysis, unique datasets — generates editorial links because it provides something genuinely linkable that didn’t exist before.

The practical barrier is cost. A proper industry survey with statistically significant sample sizes and credible methodology costs time and money. The economics work when the resulting link profile generates enough organic traffic to justify the investment, which is why original research tends to be viable for mid-authority and established sites, and harder to justify for new ones.

The shortcut: secondary analysis of publicly available data (government datasets, Companies House filings, published academic research) can produce citable insights without primary research costs. This is underused.

Digital PR with Real News Hooks

Digital PR campaigns that earn links in national and industry press have held up well because they earn the type of links that are difficult to replicate artificially — editorial placements in newsrooms with real editorial standards.

The key distinction is between campaigns built around genuine news value and campaigns built around content designed to look like news. Journalists receive hundreds of pitches. What gets picked up has a real hook: a surprising data point, a timely angle on a current story, a contrarian position from a named expert. Manufactured controversy and “quirky” surveys placed through PR syndication networks are increasingly identified as link bait rather than genuine coverage.

Effective digital PR requires understanding newsworthiness in the specific verticals you’re targeting. What constitutes a news hook in property is different from what constitutes a news hook in B2B software. Getting this right usually means working with people who have existing relationships with journalists in that sector.

Earning links from resource pages, directories, and curated lists remains effective for specific content types. Tools, calculators, comprehensive guides, and template libraries earn these links naturally if they’re genuinely useful. The mechanism is simple: if you produce the best publicly available resource on a topic, sites that compile resources on that topic will link to it.

The failure mode is producing a resource that isn’t meaningfully better than what already exists and wondering why it isn’t earning links. Resource link building requires honest assessment of whether the thing you’ve built is actually worth linking to, from the perspective of someone whose job it is to curate the best resources for their audience.

Relationship-Based Outreach

The most efficient link building is often the lowest-tech: genuine relationships with people who publish in your space. Podcast appearances, conference participation, industry events, collaboration on research or content — these generate links as a byproduct of relationships rather than as their primary purpose.

This doesn’t scale in the way that template-based outreach scales. But the links it generates are substantially stronger (higher authority, more editorially placed, more relevant) and the relationship network has compounding value beyond any single link.

What to Avoid

Automated outreach at scale. Mass-personalised outreach with AI-generated “personalisation” is identifiable and counterproductive. The response rate is effectively zero and the volume of emails sent degrades your sender reputation.

Link insertions in clearly monetised posts. Paid link insertions in blog posts from link farms or brokers are technically against Google’s guidelines and increasingly identifiable algorithmically. The short-term visibility gain is not worth the long-term penalty risk.

Reciprocal link exchanges. Link exchange networks — even when participants claim they’re “natural” — are treated as manipulative. The pattern is identifiable at scale.

The through-line in what works is that it requires producing genuine value and investing in genuine relationships. That’s slower and harder than buying links. It also produces a link profile that survives algorithm updates because it reflects what the links actually represent: other people choosing to point at your site because it contains something worth pointing at.