Link Building for SEO in 2025: Everything You Should Know

☑︎ This guide was last updated: June 2025

10+ years of successful link building and thousands of backlinks later, we can tell you for certain:

“Backlinks are still one of the top Google ranking factors.”

Cool, cool. But… what exactly does that mean in 2025?

Is it about getting mentioned on big-name blogs? Getting smart on Wikipedia? Spamming Reddit to get noticed by AI?!

This guide cuts through the noise. We will demystify link building and answer key questions:

• 🔗What link building really is and why it still matters?
• 🤖Has link building changed in the current age of AI?
• 🚦How to actually do it without getting penalized?
• ✅Which tactics work in 2025 and which ones are a waste of time?

So, whether you’re new to SEO or just need a reality check on your current strategy — this is your starting point.

Ready? Let’s get into it:

What Is Link Building and Why It Matters in 2025?

Before diving into tools, tactics, or penalties, we need a definition. Here’s one that doesn’t suck:

👉 Link building = getting other websites to link to yours.

Simple, isn’t it? But when done right, it’s a cornerstone of modern SEO — and when done wrong, it can tank your rankings faster than you can say “penalization”

So why do links matter so much?

It all goes back to Google’s original algorithm. Instead of just analyzing a page’s content, it used backlinks as a form of “vote” – assuming that if other pages are linking to you, you must have something worth linking to.

The more high-quality pages pointing to yours, the more trustworthy (and rank-worthy) your site looks.

That principle still holds in 2025…

…but Google’s gotten a lot smarter. It’s no longer about the sheer number of links – instead, it’s about the quality, relevance, and authenticity of those links.

Translation: stuffing your site with shady backlinks a) doesn’t work and b) may get you penalized.

That’s why modern link building is part SEO, part PR, part digital strategy — and 100% worth doing right.

Let’s start by understanding what makes a backlink “good” 😇 in the eyes of search engines:

High vs Low-Quality Links: What Actually Matters?

Okay, so not all backlinks are created equal.

Some are like 🪙 gold – they lift your rankings, build your site’s authority, and bring in relevant traffic. Others? About as useful as a fax machine in a thunderstorm 💩 Or worse, they get you in trouble.

Here’s what Google officially says:

Any links intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s guidelines.

Sounds scary!

But notice the keyword here: “may”. That one word changes everything:

It means link building exists in a giant grey zone – what works vs. what gets flagged often comes down to context, scale, and intent.

Here’s a useful rule of thumb:

• High-quality links 🪙 are added editorially — meaning someone consciously linked to your page because they found it useful.
• Low-quality links 💩 are placed without oversight — think unmoderated blog comments, shady directories, or mass forum profiles with your URL slapped on them.

So, does this mean that if someone mentions my website from a crappy forum, I get penalized?!

A few sketchy links won’t hurt. Mass-scale manipulation will.

Google gets that you can’t control everything. Some low-quality or weird links will show up naturally — and that’s okay.

Just don’t be the one creating them!

Plus, not all non-editorial links are bad. For example, links from social media, forums, or platforms like Reddit and Quora might be user-generated — but if they’re earned and relevant, they still have value (even with nofollow tags)!

It’s all about balance, context – and not overdoing it.

Now that we’ve defined the line between good and bad, let’s talk about what actually works in 2025 👇

Modern Link Building Strategies that Work in 2025

If we had to summarize the best link building advice in one sentence, it would sound something like this:

Earn links — don’t chase them.

The good news? In 2025, there are still several smart, scalable, and penalty-safe ways to get quality backlinks.

Let’s look at the ones worth your time:

✅ Create Link-Worthy Assets (a.k.a. Give People a Reason to Link)

Flip the game: instead of asking people for links, build something so useful, original, or insightful that people want to link to it.

Some tried-and-true formats:

• Timeless guides – such as “how to” articles or always-valid, evergreen explainers (hint: this very post ;)
• Industry roundups – curated statistics, expert opinions, tool comparisons, and other useful summaries.
• Free tools – calculators, generators, widgets. Check out some examples in our tools section!

You don’t even need to build it all yourself – some of the best linkable assets are community-driven (think YCombinator’s Hacker News or ProBlogger’s job board).

🏢 Use the Skyscraper Technique (But Smarter)

Find one or several top-performing pieces of content on your target topic. Then… make something better.

Not just longer — but more visual, more current, more actionable!

This works because people already want to link to that topic. You’re just giving them a better option.

Once published, use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to reverse-engineer your competitors’ backlinks – and pitch yours as the superior version.

BONUS POINTS if your piece includes unique tools, visuals, or data nobody else offers.

✍️ Guest Posts (Still Alive, Still Kicking)

Despite what some SEOs claim, guest posting still works — when done right.

The key is to focus on high-quality, topic-relevant websites. Look for:

• Consistent publishing schedule
• Original, non-spammy content
• Real human readers (i.e. actual traffic)

How to find guest post opportunities? Google things like:

"write for us" + your niche
Or use tools like Guest Post Tracker.

📊 Infographics, Videos & Shareable Media

Visual content can land passive links — especially if it presents complex info in a clear, digestible way.

Infographics, charts, short videos, even memes (yes, really) can all drive backlinks if they’re embedded by other blogs.

Pro tip: use reverse image search to find places that used your media without linking. Then politely ask for attribution.

🔎 Monitor Brand Mentions (and Turn Them into Links)

If someone mentioned your brand but didn’t link it — that’s a missed opportunity.

Use tools like Ahrefs Alerts or Google Alerts to track mentions of your brand name, product, or even key employees.

Then reach out and ask them to hyperlink the mention. Most will say yes — especially if the mention is positive.

🧹 Broken Link Building (a Classic for a Reason)

Find dead outbound links on high-authority pages in your niche. Offer your own relevant content as a replacement.

Why it works: you’re helping the webmaster fix a problem — and improving their user experience.

Where to find broken links:

• “Resources” pages or curated link lists
• Ahrefs’ Site Explorer > Outgoing Links > Broken links
• Chrome extensions like Check My Links

Once you’ve found a relevant broken link, either match it to an existing page on your site — or create a new, better one.

Then reach out with a friendly message like:

“Hey! Just spotted a broken link on your page [URL]. I recently published a piece that covers similar ground — here it is in case you’re updating that section.”

***

That’s it — six modern, sustainable link building strategies that Google (and humans) love.

Next: let’s talk about what *not* to do… unless you enjoy SEO disasters 👇

Risky Link Building Tactics You Better Avoid

To avoid both manual and automatic downgrades of your website by the search engines, here are some link-building strategies you should abstain from:

Comment spam implies leaving comments on blog posts which either allow inserting links into the comment body or linking the comment author’s name. If you’re running a blog, you’ve most likely gotten a lot of comments along these lines:

Doing a quick Google search for the same phrase gives you thousands of results with identical wording (i.e. non-unique content):

To see why comment spam on a large scale is a useless (and potentially dangerous) SEO tactic, let’s consider the possible scenarios based on two factors: whether a blog moderates the comments before making them public and whether the comment links are dofollow –

• Moderated, nofollow links – even if your comment does get approved eventually, any links inside it will be nofollow, i.e. not tracked by the search engine bots. This kind of defeats the entire purpose of the enterprise.
• Moderated, dofollow links – such blogs are quite rare nowadays, and if you do find some from your niche, you’ll need your comment (and the contained link) to really be unique and have value-added to get approved. This is very difficult to implement on a massive scale, and is still less preferable than full-fledged content submissions such as guest posts.
• Unmoderated, dofollow links – a magnet to various spammers, so over time such pages become so littered with comments linking to all kinds of non-topical websites, that being in such a crowded, low-authority company is not what you want for your links.
• Unmoderated, nofollow links – the “worst of both worlds”, no explanation required.

In total, this implies that mass-spamming other blogs with backlink-containing comments is both impractical and risky.

Forum spam is another similar tactic, which can take the form of putting the link within your signature or post’s body or creating a bunch of fake profiles that post links to your web resource. Either way, it’s a useless strategy to say the least, even if the forum is a respected and moderated one: since forum threads tend to include multiple replies, and since you’re not the only one doing this, your outgoing links will be on the same page with dozens of other (mostly irrelevant, and sometimes low-quality) outgoing links – not very useful when it comes to passing authority.

Low-quality directories are apparently still a thing, considering the number of offers on freelance marketplaces to “place your link in 300 directories for $10”. While this might look like a real bargain, beware that it might also get you penalized by the search engines: directories that accept mass submissions, especially unmoderated ones, are places where mostly low-quality websites will hoard, thus creating very shady surroundings from your links.

In general, though, even moderated directories with paid entry are not the smartest way to build effective links nowadays, as Google gives more and more preference to user value and engagement. They had a blast in the early years of the Web, but now it’s about time we said goodbye to this SEO tactic.

Private Blog Networks, or PBNs, are another place where you don’t want your backlinks to live. A PBN is an interlinked group of websites (usually built on recycled expired domains) owned by the same entity carefully disguised as independent blogs in order to pass link authority in a pre-defined manner. Google has been penalizing PBNs heavily since 2014, and while their tactics did become more refined over time, the search giant still allegedly has little trouble identifying such structures, given the gargantuan amounts of data and processing power it wields.

As a webmaster, though, you might be wondering how to actually tell if the website you’re looking to publish on is a part of a private blog network in the first place. As mentioned earlier, the PBNs that do survive to the present day are more sophisticated than their ancestors, but there are some telltale signs you’re dealing with one:

• Thin and superficial content: since PBN constituents are usually created by buying expired domains and fulling them with new content, such content is usually produced at scale, and at the lowest possible cost. You can quickly tell from the quantity and quality of the available content if a website is intended for real people or is just there to pass link juice.
• Domain name that does not quite fit the content: while PBN owners try to search for expired domains that match their target niche, it’s not always possible to obtain such in needed quantities – which means some of the blogs in the network will have strange-looking domain names that have little relevance to their main topic.
• Another website used to be on the same domain: if you have suspicions, you can use the Wayback Machine to check if the same domain used to have a completely unrelated website on it earlier.
• Very little multimedia: unique media is more difficult to produce at scale than text, so PBN blogs will have much less (or none) of it compared to legit websites.
• Abnormal backlink profile: if you check the backlinks of a PBN constituent by a specialized tool such as Ahrefs Site Explorer, you’ll notice certain patterns such as large numbers of broken links, stale or negative link growth over the past year, as well as incoming links that are not relevant to the current topic of the blog. These are all red flags which indicate a PBN candidate.
• You’re being offered backlinks from a dozen blogs by the same person: maintaining a high-quality blog is a laborious task, and while many web entrepreneurs do handle multiple websites, it’s very rare that a single organization disperses itself into more than a couple of these. Anyone offering you simultaneous placement on 20 blogs is most probably a PBN owner.

Link Penalties and How to Recover from Them

Most SEO experts think that low-quality links are not taken too seriously by Google and other search engines. After all, you can never have 100% control over the process of external pages linking to your web resource. However, despite the fact that in most cases unintended or occasional bad links do tend to get devalued rather than sink your rankings, when used on a massive scale those can still be quite harmful.

Back in 2012 Google released the first Penguin algorithm update – a weapon of mass destruction for low-quality links, with the abusing sites becoming confined to the fringes of the web. Since that time, several more iterations of Penguin have been released, each next being smarter at identifying shady link-building strategies. The latest version, 4.0, is claimed by Google to be a real-time and page-specific feature – in other words, the search engine now wields laser precision when it comes to identifying and punishing low-quality links.

There are two types of penalties that Google can bring down on a web page that has been caught on link spam – algorithmic and manual:

Algorithmic penalty, as you’ve probably guessed from the name, involves no humans in reviewing potentially bad links. Most of those are passed by the Penguin algorithms we’ve discussed above. Is there a way to determine whether your website has been hit by an algorithmic link action? Unfortunately, you won’t get any notifications – it works “in the background”, and all you’ll see will be precipitous SERP declines over a short period of time.

Manual penalty, in contrast the previous one, is applied by someone from Google’s Webspam Team. It could be triggered by: a spam report from someone else, you being in a competitive niche actively monitored by Google, or some suspicious aspect in your link profile.

How do you determine that you’ve been hit by a manual link penalty? Easily – you will get an email notification from Google. In general, though, it doesn’t matter what type of penalty you’ve been stricken by – both types lead to a drop in SERPs and consequently a drop in traffic. The worse-case scenario is being de-indexed, i.e. disappearing from the search results entirely.

In general, though, it doesn’t matter what type of penalty you’ve been stricken by – both types lead to a drop in SERPs and consequently a drop in traffic. The worse-case scenario is being de-indexed, i.e. disappearing from the search results entirely.

What should you do if you’ve actually been hit by a link penalty (i.e. experienced a sharp drop in rankings and/or got a manual action notice from Google)? First thing to do is clean up the mess by removing the low-quality links or telling Google which links should not be taken into account, in case you’re unable to remove them for one or another reason. Below we’ll provide a detailed sequence of steps involving Ahrefs’ SEO toolkit; we will assume that you have already added your website to the Ahrefs Dashboard (by using the “+ Add a website” button):

1. Generate a list of links to your website using the Site Explorer tool by inputting your website’s URL (or simply clicking on your website’s name in the Dashboard). From the overview, click on “Backlinks” in the left menu to see the incoming links.
2. Find low-quality links by analyzing each inbound link from the list, based on what we’ve discussed above about link quality; pay special attention to the following: links from websites outside of your niche, links from shabby-looking pages, links with weird domain names, links with anchors that seem to be spammy, links from websites you can’t recognize.
3. Create a disavow file containing a list of links that you consider detrimental to your website. You can do it manually or use the built-in functionality right inside the Site Explorer’s “Backlinks” view: when you find a link you’d like to add to the Disavow, tick the checkbox next to it and click on “Disavow domains” button that appears above the table of links. After you’ve gone through all your backlinks, return to the Dashboard and hit “Disavow links” in the row that lists your website. In the next screen, click on “Export” in the top right corner, then tick the “Save as TXT for upload to Google Disavow Tool” option and hit “Ok”.
4. Upload the disavow file to Google through the interface available in the Google Disavow tool. Each time you upload a new version of the disavow file, it’s better to be on the safe side and repeat all previously disavowed links in the new uploads as well.

If you’re under a manual penalty, you should’ve also received an email stating the reason, and the same email will contain a link to the section of Google Webmaster Tools (if you’re still not using this instrument, go create an account right now!) which allows you to send a reconsideration request after you’ve cleaned up the faulty links. In case you’re facing an algo penalty, the only thing left to do is wait until Google notices the positive changes in your link profile and corrects its earlier decisions regarding your rankings. This can take anywhere from several weeks to several months, during which time you are advised to closely monitor your SERPs and incoming organic traffic for signs of improvement.

Keeping Your Link Profile Natural

As you’ve seen above, dealing with link penalties is never a pleasant work. This means it’s worth making every effort to avoid getting penalized in the first place. How do search engines decide which websites to punish for their backlinks and when? The exact details of their algorithms are never disclosed, yet the overall principle is easy to come by: they aim at distinguishing between sites that get their links naturally (i.e. thanks to being useful to others), and those that employ manipulative tactics with the sole aim of ranking higher.

A natural-looking link profile is therefore something any webmaster should be striving towards when they decide to engage in active link-building campaigns. “Naturality” should be present at both the individual link level and the overall link profile of the website. First, let’s go over the properties of each standalone inbound link:

• Position on the page – the most natural way to include links to other resources is inside the main content of a page or post; links from sidebars, header (especially navigation menus) as well as footers look much more suspicious and should therefore be handled with extreme caution.
• Surroundings – a link that just sits there on a page by its own might look less natural than the one embedded into a text. That text should also, of course, be relevant to the links (yes, search engines can easily gauge relevance nowadays, using their vast training datasets).
• Anchor – the text of the link itself should, too, be relevant to its surroundings and of course to the external page it leads to. Brand mentions or generic anchors (such as “here” or “more information”) are usually safer than clearly keyword-optimized link text (i.e. using an entire keyphrase as an anchor).
• Visibility – if a webmaster adds an outbound link consciously and really endorses the target page, they will never think of hiding or obstructing the link in any way. For that reason, backlinks hidden with styling methods like extremely small font size or text color that is almost indistinguishable from the page background, are clear red flags.
• Forwarded traffic – if the page that contains the backlink receives any visitors at all, some of them are likely to follow the link if it’s relevant, useful, and otherwise satisfies the above criteria; therefore, if a backlink sends some real visitors your way, it is not only good for your inbound traffic, but also a sign to the search engine bots that the backlink is legit.

Apart from that, it is worthwhile considering the entirety of your incoming links as a single statistical group and making sure that the following criteria are not skewed and don’t look suspicious:

• Anchor composition – diversity, frequency of occurrence, as well as specific keywords are important here: instead of containing only keyword-optimized anchors, branded links, generic anchors and URL anchors (that’s when a full web address is used as a link text) should typically be expected to prevail in a natural link profile.
• Dofollow/nofollow proportions – while most SEO campaigns are focused on obtaining links without the “nofollow” attribute, i.e. those that are counted by the search engines towards your website’s overall inbound authority, it is unwise to think to Google and others don’t “see” them at all – websites with only dofollow links pointing at them can easily be considered as candidates for link manipulation and therefore receive further close “inspection” (you don’t want that to happen to your site, for sure).
• Inbound authority distribution – statistical principles such as the Law of Large Numbers and the Central limit theorem imply that a website with many backlinks will almost inevitably have more weaker backlinks that stronger ones (after all, there are much more sites with low authority on the web). A situation when most of your inbound links come from pages with extremely high authority parameters doesn’t look natural, rather smells of over-optimization.
• Evolution with time – apart from the link profile being balanced at any given point in time, it is also worth noting that sudden changes in any of the above parameters will raise doubts as to the absence of active manipulation from your side. In other words, strong and future-proof link profiles are built gradually and steadily over significant periods – months and years, certainly not days or weeks.

All of the above are easily monitored with the Site Explorer tool by Ahrefs we’ve mentioned earlier: most of the times, you can spot a website with a suspicious backlink profile by simply looking at the dashboard result of this tool’s analysis. Additional insights can be obtained by going through the specific sections of the Site Explorer report.

Don’t Forget about Outgoing Links

While most of SEO focuses on incoming links (which is totally understandable, given their influence on the search results rankings), we couldn’t skip outbound links in this guide because they also play a vital role in determining the level of authority of a page and even the entire website.

In order to play it safe it terms of linking out, it’s recommended to keep the following simple principles in mind:

• Avoid out-of-context outbound links, especially to websites outside of your niche – Google has become quite good at gauging the meaning of a given text, so it’s also easy for the search engine to determine if a linked resource has anything to do with the topic being discussed in the text.
• Don’t link to low-quality content – no matter if it’s been done intentionally or by mistake, linking to shady, hacked, or malware-infested websites is a big red flag for Google; since the websites you link to are also part of your “link surroundings” on par with inbound links, being “surrounded” with low-quality websites is not what you want when optimizing your pages for best search result performance.
• Avoid hiding outbound links, search engine crawlers will find them in any case because they look at the code, not the visual representation of a page.
• Fight comment spam on your own pages – just like you don’t want your backlink to be in a “bad company” of dozens of other shady links on someone’s page, it’s not a good idea to allow for such a “link fest” on your own blog posts as well.
• Fix broken outbound links – such sloppiness simply tells Google that the website is not being well-maintained.

Build a Future-Proof Link Profile

As you’ve seen above, correcting your link-building mistakes can be a tedious, slow, and painful process – that’s why it is always advisable to play it safe right from the start and keep an eye on the quality of your incoming and outgoing links at all times. A more modest, but healthier link profile containing only high-quality links is much more preferable and safer in the long run than a bloated backlink base built with questionable methods. Keep that in mind and search traffic will follow!

Left with unanswered questions? Have something to add? Feel free to share your thoughts in a comment section below and of course don’t hesitate to tell your friends about this guide on your social media channels :)