- Backlinks still decide rankings: the number one result averages 3.8 times more backlinks than positions two to ten, and the most common reason a page gets no search traffic is that nothing links to it.
- The twelve methods below range from an afternoon of work to a quarter-long campaign. Start with the cheap ones you already have access to (mentions, partners, listings), run guest posts and insertions as the engine, and add data and PR once there are pages worth linking to.
- Quality decides whether a link counts: a relevant page with readers, chosen by an editor. Cheap network links cost money and return nothing; the methods here all pass that test.
Every guide to getting backlinks lists the same tactics, and most readers finish them with no idea where to start. The useful question is which methods fit the time, assets and budget you have this quarter, and in what order. This guide answers that: twelve ways to get backlinks that work in 2026, ranked from least to most effort, with what each returns and who it suits.
We build links for clients every day, so the ranking reflects campaigns rather than theory. It also covers the outreach numbers you should expect, how many links a page needs before it moves, what to skip, and how to tell whether the work is paying.
What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link on someone else’s website that points to a page on yours. You will also see them called inbound links or incoming links, and they are the same thing viewed from your side of the link. From the perspective of the site doing the linking, the same link is an external or outbound link.
Here is a plain example. Imagine a food blogger writes a post about brewing better coffee at home and, partway through, adds a sentence like “for the science behind decaffeination, see this guide from Healthline.” The words that are clickable carry a link to a page on Healthline. That link is a backlink for Healthline. One website has effectively pointed its readers toward another and, in doing so, told search engines that the Healthline page was worth referencing.
That is the entire concept. A backlink is a connection from one site to another, created whenever a publisher decides a page is useful enough to link to. Getting them deliberately is the link building process, and the strategy runs end to end from prospecting to placement.
Why backlinks still matter in 2026
Two findings settle the question. Backlinko’s analysis of 11.8 million results found the number one result has 3.8 times more backlinks than positions two to ten combined on average. Ahrefs’ study of search traffic found that the overwhelming majority of pages get no organic traffic from Google, and that the most common reason is a lack of backlinks. Google’s systems have changed what they count since those studies, and the direction of change is toward editorial links on real pages and away from everything else.
The practical consequence for a site owner is that publishing is half the job. A page competing against results that each have thirty referring domains will not rank with none, however good it is, and the gap closes through the methods below rather than through more content.
What a good backlink looks like
Before chasing any of the twelve, fix the standard, because a link that fails it is not worth the effort of getting. A good backlink sits on a page that real people visit, on a site that relates to your topic, placed by an editor or author who could have declined, inside the body of the content with an anchor that describes your page. Payment, content or a relationship behind the placement does not change that; the page and the decision do. The full checklist for a high-quality backlink takes five minutes per prospect and saves months of wasted outreach.
The 12 ways to get backlinks, ranked by effort
Ranked from the quickest to the most demanding. Most sites should run the first three this week, make numbers six and nine the engine, and add the last three once there are pages worth pointing a campaign at.
1. Reclaim unlinked mentions
Pages that already name your brand, product or research without linking are the easiest links on the web, because the editor has already decided you are worth citing. Set an alert on your brand terms, check monthly, and send a short, polite request with the exact URL. Conversion is the highest of any method, and the same routine for lost backlinks recovers links you once had.
2. Ask partners and suppliers
Every supplier, integration partner, reseller, client and association has a reason to mention you. Partner pages, joint case studies, testimonials with a link and launch announcements all produce editorial links from relevant domains, and most companies have dozens of these relationships that have never been asked.
3. Complete the industry listings
Trade associations, chambers, certification bodies, software marketplaces and the curated directories in your niche give a site its foundation layer in an afternoon. None of them moves a competitive ranking alone; all of them make the rest of the profile look like a real company.
4. Get onto resource pages
“Resources for”, “tools for” and “best guides to” pages exist in every field, and their owners add good entries because a better list is the point of the page. Find the ones that already rank, confirm your page belongs, and ask with one sentence on why.
5. Publish comparison and alternatives pages
Honest “X vs Y” and “alternatives to X” pages rank for high-intent queries and get cited by every roundup writer in the category. The links arrive from the writers who need a reference, which makes this the one content type that earns links as a side effect of converting.
6. Place link insertions
A sentence and a link added to an article that already ranks on a relevant site, agreed with the editor. The page already has readers and trust, so the link starts working within weeks, and because the publisher has to approve a change to a live page, the editorial test is built in. Vetted niche edits are the fastest method on this list for moving a specific page.
7. Answer journalist requests
Platforms such as Source of Sources, Qwoted and Featured post requests from journalists looking for sources; answering within the hour with a specific, quotable point earns citations from publications you could not pitch cold. Budget thirty minutes a day and expect a handful of strong links a month. The HARO alternatives that still work are a short list.
8. Run broken link building
Resource pages and old articles accumulate dead outbound links. Crawl them, find the dead references on your topic, and offer your page as the replacement. Yield per prospect is modest and the prospecting is slow, so broken link building works best as a batch job by topic rather than as a standalone campaign.
9. Write guest posts
Articles written for publications your buyers read, with your link where it belongs in the text. Site selection is everything: real traffic, named editors, topical fit. Done to that standard, a guest post is among the most reliable links there is, and the guest posting guide covers the pitching and the writing.
10. Build free tools and templates
A calculator, a checker, a generator or a set of templates built around one thing your audience does gets listed on resource pages for years and linked from guides that mention the task. Host it on your main domain in a subfolder so the authority reaches the rest of the site.
11. Publish original data
A survey, an analysis of your own usage data or a study of a public dataset gives writers a number to cite, and a number with a source is the most durable reason to link that exists. One study a year, refreshed at the same URL and promoted to the writers who cited similar numbers before, outperforms a dozen opinion pieces.
12. Run digital PR
Campaigns built on a story or a dataset journalists want earn links from national and trade press, the top of the authority scale. In Editorial.Link’s 2026 survey of 518 SEO professionals, 48.6% named digital PR the most effective link building tactic; it is also the most expensive and least predictable, so it belongs on top of a steady program rather than instead of one. The digital PR for SEO playbook covers angles, pitching and measurement.
Twelve methods, one standard. Each produces links an editor chose, on pages people read, which is why each keeps counting after the campaign ends.
Outreach that gets replies
Nine of the twelve methods involve asking someone for a link, so the outreach decides the yield. Expect low numbers and plan for them: in Backlinko and Pitchbox’s analysis of 12 million outreach emails, 8.5% received any response. The same study shows what moves that figure, and none of it is clever.
Qualify before you pitch, so that every email goes to a site with readers and a page where your link makes sense. Write to a named person, open with one specific line that proves you read the page, state the reason the link helps their reader in two sentences, and ask once. Follow up after five days and again a week later, each shorter than the last, then stop. The link building outreach templates we use cover each of the methods above, including the follow-ups.
How many backlinks you need
The number depends on the query and the pages already ranking for it, which is why generic targets mislead. Look at the referring domains of the current top five for your target query and aim to match the lower end with better relevance; for most long-tail commercial queries that is five to fifteen relevant domains to the page, and for competitive heads it is dozens. Working out how many backlinks you need for a specific page takes ten minutes with any backlink checker and saves a quarter of guessing.
Timing follows the same logic. Links placed this month are crawled within days and reflected in rankings over four to eight weeks, and a page’s movement compounds as its cluster gains authority over two or three quarters. Report monthly and judge quarterly.
What to skip
Three things waste money reliably. Bulk packages of hundreds of links at a flat price are built from networks and automated spam, which Google has neutralized in real time since 2016; the links cost whatever you paid and pass nothing, and the full list of black hat link building techniques explains why. Links from sites with no organic traffic, whatever their authority score, fail the audience test and count for little. And homepage-only link building lifts the domain in general while leaving the pages that need to rank exactly where they were.
Everything else on the twelve-method list passes the standard. The difference between a method that works and one that does not is never the technique; it is the site, the page and whether an editor chose the link.
Measuring results and when to outsource
Measure referring domains per target page rather than total links, then the rankings of those pages for their primary queries, then the traffic and conversions they produce. Verify every link live, followed and indexed before counting it, and re-check monthly, because links drift. The KPIs worth tracking fit on one page.
Most of the twelve methods reward repetition: the publisher relationships, the qualified prospect lists and the pitching habits all build over hundreds of sends, which is why teams that run outreach a few hours a week rarely match the yield of teams that run it daily. When the work keeps slipping, or the links arrive on the wrong pages, that is the point at which companies hand it over. Our link building service runs methods six, nine and twelve for clients with every site approved before placement. When we ran it for Breeze, a project management tool, organic traffic rose 207% in six months on links that are all still live.
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