A lot of backlink advice still circulating online describes tactics that stopped working years ago, or that work but carry enough risk to not be worth it for most businesses. Directory submissions, blog comment links, and bulk guest post networks fall into the first category. Here's what's actually moving the needle now.
Journalist requests, still underrated
Services that connect journalists looking for expert sources with people willing to be quoted (the HARO model, even as the specific platforms have changed) remain one of the highest-quality link sources available, because the resulting link comes from a genuine news or publisher domain, attached to a real quote that adds something to the article. The catch is volume and speed. Most usable requests get five or ten qualified responses within an hour, so you need either someone monitoring constantly or an automated system that can draft a response fast enough to be one of the first ones a journalist sees.
Original research and data
Publishing genuinely original data, a survey of your own customers, an analysis of your own platform's usage patterns, a benchmark study, gives other writers something concrete to cite. This is slower to pay off than outreach-based tactics, but the links it earns tend to be unsolicited, which carries more weight than a link you asked for.
Digital PR around a real news hook
A genuinely newsworthy angle (a notable milestone, a timely data point tied to a current event, a strong opinion on something the industry is already discussing) earns coverage that directory submissions never will. This takes more creative effort than templated outreach, but it's also harder for competitors to copy.
What to actively avoid now
- Paid link networks and PBNs. Google's detection has improved enough that the risk-to-reward ratio rarely makes sense anymore.
- Generic guest post pitches at scale. Most publishers now recognize and reject these instantly, and the few that accept them tend to be low-quality sites that won't move rankings anyway.
- Reciprocal link exchanges. "I'll link to you if you link to me" patterns are easy for Google to detect at scale.
Auditing what you already have
Before building new links, check your existing backlink profile for anything actively harmful: spammy directories from an old campaign, expired domains that got repurposed by a different, lower-quality site, or links from sites that have since been penalized. A disavow file isn't a one-time task; it's worth rechecking every few months, since the web around your existing links keeps changing even when you're not actively building new ones.
How this fits into automation
RankMesh's Outreach and HARO agent monitors journalist requests continuously and drafts responses fast enough to compete with manual monitoring, while the Toxic Link Cleaner runs the disavow audit on a monthly schedule rather than whenever someone remembers to check. Link building still benefits from human judgment on which opportunities are worth pursuing. What it doesn't need is a human staring at a monitoring dashboard all day waiting for the next request to come in.