The world of search engine optimization (SEO) has rapidly changed in recent months.
Major changes to Google’s algorithm have seen some sites’ rankings crash, while others like Reddit and Quora now dominate search engine results pages (SERPs).
Backlinks continue to be one of the main factors that decides how high a website ranks on Google—but some once-popular link-building techniques are no longer effective.
If you run a website, it’s critical to understand which link-building services work in 2024. The 8 services listed in this article will help you avoid wasting your time and money, and ensure your website ranks higher on search engines.
8 Powerful Link Building Services For 2024
8 Link-Building Services That Still Work
Build Natural, High-Quality Backlinks with Authority Builders
8 Link-Building Services That Still Work
The link-building services discussed below are all effective ways to boost your website rankings. Some of them we provide to our customers, others we don’t.
It’s worth noting that there is some crossover between the entries. For example, even though most of the services discussed involve some form of outreach, we’ve included blogger outreach as a separate technique because it’s commonly sold as a standalone service.
1. Content marketing
Content marketing means different things to different people. For the purposes of SEO, it involves publishing high-quality content that your audience wants or needs.
It generates links because it is so valuable or engaging that your audience will want to show it to others.
This is the most natural kind of backlink you can get, which means search engines will pay attention to them and you’ll have almost zero risk of incurring a Google manual action.
| 💡 What is a manual action? |
| A manual action is when a human auditor at a search engine penalizes a website for trying to manipulate search results.
This could involve the website having its rankings reduced or even the entire website getting deindexed. Manual actions are rare and usually only occur if you have a large number of manipulative backlinks. |
If your content is good enough, then your website’s popularity will begin to snowball and it will continue generating more and more backlinks over time—all with little or no effort from you.
What are content marketing services?
These days, there are a number of agencies that specialize in content marketing. They usually provide the following services:
Strategy: Content marketing agencies will find out what you want to achieve and will recommend a strategy to achieve that.
Ideation: A good content marketing agency will come up with ideas for content that your audience will enjoy and search engines will want to rank highly.
Examples of great content include:
✍️ Original research
✍️ Useful, in-depth guides
✍️ Case studies
✍️ Whitepapers
✍️ Courses and other learning resources
Research: Great content is well-sourced and based on expertise. A good content agency will:
🎯 Gain insights from your subject matter experts.
🎯 Read your competitors’ content.
🎯 Reach out to other experts in the industry.
Optimization: These days, it’s critical that content is optimized for search. This means:
💡Helping search engines to understand your content.
💡Showing search engines that it is rich and useful for readers.
💡Ensuring the right audience finds your content via search.
Content agencies have various tools and techniques to ensure this happens.
Publicize: An agency will also help publicize your content. Examples include direct mailing campaigns or telling followers about it on social media.
Example: AI strategy guide
Technology and research consulting firm Gartner generates tons of backlinks by sharing research results and compiling guides that businesses find super useful.
For example, the company recently published a workbook to help businesses implement generative AI.
So far, it’s generated 1,200 backlinks from 119 domains. It also gets 314 monthly visitors.
You can see that these numbers are increasing as word of the workbook spreads.
⚠️ Avoid relying on AI-generated content |
| AI is a useful tool for helping you write—especially if you are not a professional writer. But you shouldn’t rely on AI to write your content for you.
AI doesn’t have any expertise in your field or contribute any original thoughts. Content that is 100% based on AI will have limited value and won’t be unique. Plus, using mass-produced AI content in an attempt to manipulate search rankings is against Google’s spam policies and could land you with a manual action. Avoid working with freelance writers and agencies that heavily rely on AI to produce content. |
The pros and cons of content creation
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ Display your expertise to audiences. | ❌ Resource-intensive and time-consuming. |
| ✔️ Generate passive backlinks. | ❌ Can take a long time to generate results. |
| ✔️ Content can also be reused for sales and marketing. | ❌ Creating genuinely valuable content isn’t easy. |
| ✔️ Show search engines that your website is active and regularly updated. | ❌ Finding good writers can be challenging. |
2. Linkable assets
Linkable assets are similar to content marketing but usually have a broader scope. We’re talking:
🔗 Videos
🔗 Free apps or tools
🔗 Infographics
🔗 Resource pages
🔗 Quizzes
🔗 Games
Once again, they should be so good that people want to link to them. And like with content, you’ll either need to hire a specialist agency or a freelancer to ensure your assets are professionally produced.
Linkable assets are particularly effective because they are often less effort for audiences to digest.
For example, watching a 2-minute video is less taxing than reading a 500-word article. This means audiences are more likely to engage with it and therefore, more likely to share it with others.
The link-building service you choose to pay for depends on what asset you want to create. For example:
💡A video could be made by a specialist video agency.
💡An infographic could be created by a graphic design agency.
💡A free app would be built by a developer.
Example: Paperless Pipeline commission calculator
Here’s a good example of a linkable asset from real estate software developer Paperless Pipeline.
They provide a free tool that allows real estate brokers to calculate how much commission they need to pay at the end of real estate deals.
This is a simple but useful tool that could save brokers lots of time, without spending anything. Best of all, it’s highly relevant to the company’s target audience.
So far, the tool has generated 74 backlinks from 33 domains. It gets 478 visitors per month.
The pros and cons of linkable assets
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ Generate organic traffic by providing users with something genuinely useful. | ❌ Resource-intensive and time-consuming. |
| ✔️ Generate passive backlinks. | ❌ Can take a long time to generate results. |
| ✔️ Users are more likely to engage with images, apps, and videos than long-form text-based content. | ❌ Creating genuinely valuable assets isn’t easy. |
| ✔️ Having a range of media (not just text) on your website is a ranking factor. |
3. Digital PR
Digital PR involves getting your company into the news. This could be because you have:
📣 Interesting company news to announce—for example, a new high-profile CEO.
📣 An opinion on a current issue.
📣 Guidance or advice on a subject.
📣 A fun idea that your audience might find entertaining.
📣 Useful insights.
📣 Plans to hold an event.
Whatever your approach is, it needs to relate to current affairs. For example, if new legislation is enacted that impacts your sector, you might write a thought leadership piece and seek to publish it in an industry magazine.
Digital PR is a great way to build links because news websites often have high authority and traffic. Search engines trust them to provide useful and substantiated insights.
That means these kinds of links generally have a greater impact on your rankings than those from blogs or other sources.
Digital PR services are usually quite expensive, as it takes a lot of effort to get media coverage. This is mainly because journalists know their audience well.
They will only publish what they think their readers (or viewers) will find useful or engaging.
A good PR agency will usually:
📣 Come up with ideas for PR campaigns.
📣 Produce any content required.
📣 Make any arrangements required (such as hiring a venue for an event).
📣 Reach out to journalists and provide any additional information they might require.
📣 Track and monitor the success of your campaign.
Digital PR example: Towergate Insurance
Here’s a good example of a digital PR campaign from UK-based Towergate Insurance.
One of the company’s directors has been interviewed by Caravan Times, providing expert opinion on caravan insurance.
The website is relevant to Towergate’s services, is likely to help raise brand awareness in its industry, and would probably drive traffic to its website.
This is a good example of a digital PR campaign because:
✔️ The linking website and content are highly relevant to Towergate’s services.
✔️ The link could generate business for the company.
✔️ The article displays the company’s expertise in this niche.
⚠️ Avoid: Press releases |
| There are plenty of platforms that will publish press releases for free. This used to be a good source of easy links. Companies would simply churn out press releases about anything and link back to their website.
However, Google has gotten wise to this and links from these platforms won’t give you much, if any, ranking benefit. Of course, if you have something newsworthy that you want to publicize then you should still use a press release—but don’t rely on it for backlinks. Press releases picked up by media organizations and published as proper articles are more likely to result in a rankings benefit. |
The pros and cons of digital PR
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ Generates links from highly authoritative websites. | ❌ Digital PR services tend to be very expensive. |
| ✔️ Increases your exposure to relevant audiences. | ❌ It can be difficult to get journalists’ attention. |
| ✔️ Generates organic traffic. | |
| ✔️ Helps you build relationships with journalists. |
4. Connectively
Connectively is a platform that connects journalists, content creators, PR agents, and experts.
Journalists or writers post requests for expert opinions or information. Experts then answer those requests and the journalist quotes them in the article. Ideally, they will also link to the expert’s website.
Connectively is a great way to find ways to display your industry expertise, build relationships with journalists, and get some really powerful links.
But there are a few downsides:
⚠️ Some industries are under-represented and you might not be able to find any questions relevant to you.
⚠️ Even if you do, there’s no guarantee journalists will choose your pitch.
⚠️ Connectively tends to be a numbers game. About one in 10 pitches will be successful, so building ten links requires around 50 pitches.
⚠️ Speed is important, too. Journalists on Connectively usually have a tight deadline and often go with the first decent pitch they receive.
⚠️ Journalists are often overwhelmed with low-quality responses where people with no expertise copy information from online articles and present it as their own. This makes it harder for them to find genuine expert responses.
Some link builders provide Connectively services. This usually involves them writing responses on your behalf. Make sure you work with a company that:
🔍 Leans on your expertise to write responses.
🔍 Targets relevant topics, rather than taking a scattergun approach.
🔍 Provides detailed reports on the links they have built, including what you have been quoted as saying.
Connectively used to be called Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and was a free service. You can still use it, but the free version is extremely limited. Regular users will need to sign up for a paid package:
📰 The Core package is $19 per month and allows you to send 25 pitches per month.
📰 The Pro package is $49 per month and allows you to send 50 pitches per month.
📰 The Premier package is $149 per month and allows you to send 150 pitches per month.
The pros and cons of Connectively
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ Generates links from authoritative websites. | ❌ You need to make a lot of pitches to be successful. |
| ✔️ Increases your exposure to relevant audiences. | ❌ It can be difficult to get journalists’ attention. |
| ✔️ Low cost. | |
| ✔️ Helps you build relationships with journalists. |
5. Broken link building
Broken link building is when you look for broken links on a website and then offer to fix them by providing replacement content.
It’s a great way to build links because everyone’s a winner:
✔️ The site owner gets a broken link fixed.
✔️ Visitors to the site get a better user experience.
✔️ You get a backlink for relatively little effort.
Also, broken link building tends to be more authoritative, generate more traffic, and provide greater ranking benefits than building links with fresh content.
That’s because content with broken links has usually had time to get indexed and has built up trust with search engines. Once you’ve built a link with the content, some of this trust and authority will pass to your website.
Broken link building is a relatively common service. A good broken link-building service will:
✔️ Use SEO tools to find broken links on relevant websites.
✔️ Reach out to site owners and propose a fix.
✔️ Produce any additional content that might be required to build the link.
You’ll usually be asked to provide the page(s) you want to build links to and the anchor text you want the link to use.
Some broken link-building services will adjust your anchor text to suit each individual placement, others can even suggest anchor text for you.
The pros and cons of broken link building
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ Relatively low effort. | ❌ Opportunities can be limited. |
| ✔️ Allows you to target relevant websites. | ❌ Some site owners will ask for payment. |
| ✔️ Helps you build relationships with website owners. | |
6. Guest post link building
This is probably the most popular form of link building and for good reason—it still delivers results.
Guest posting is when you write for someone else’s website and receive a link back to your website.
It’s a great way to target link-building campaigns at high-quality websites. You can also generate additional organic traffic and display your expertise to new audiences.
However, guest posting can also be hard work, so it’s sometimes worth hiring someone to do it for you.
A good guest posting service will include:
✔️ Writing articles for you.
✔️ Reaching out to website owners and pitching ideas to them.
✔️ Negotiating payment on your behalf.
✔️ Tracking and reporting
The problem is that there are plenty of poor-quality guest-posting services out there. They use AI to auto-generate articles and post them on link farms.
👨🌾 What’s a link farm? |
| Link farms are websites that exist solely to sell links for profit. They usually have:
👨🌾 High domain rating (DR), low traffic. 👨🌾 Poor-quality content. 👨🌾 No particular focus, instead covering vague topics such as “business.” 👨🌾 No or very little activity on social media. |
You should look for a guest-posting service that:
✔️ Writes professional-quality content.
✔️ Understands your niche and chooses relevant websites to post on.
✔️ Performs genuine outreach to website owners—as opposed to posting on a few generic websites that they have pre-existing agreements with.
✔️ Chooses high-quality websites to guest post with.
Example of a guest post: Psychology Today
Here’s a good example of a guest post from Psychology Today. Dr. Grant Hilary Brenner wrote an article that highlights a recent research study and what it means for PTSD victims.
Here’s why it’s good:
✔️ The website is relevant and authoritative in the psychology sector.
✔️ It displays Dr. Brenner’s expertise.
✔️ It’s useful and interesting for the website’s audience.
✔️ His practice gets a link at the bottom of the article.
✔️ The website has a DR of 92 and gets 6.8 million monthly visitors.
| ℹ️ What is domain rating (DR)? |
| Domain rating is a measurement of a website’s authority, developed by Ahrefs. Its SEO tool relies on several factors, including the number of links the website gets.
Generally, websites with higher DR have a greater chance of ranking higher on search engines. Other SEO tools have their own versions of DR. For example, Moz calls it domain authority (DA). It’s worth noting that Google does not use DR or DA when ranking websites. Instead, these metrics reflect how authoritative the search engine’s algorithm may think a site is. |
The pros and cons of guest posting
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ You can target authoritative, relevant websites. | ❌ Writing is resource-intensive. |
| ✔️ Gains exposure to new audiences. | ❌ Some site owners will ask for payment. |
| ✔️ Displays your expertise. | ❌ Coming up with original and valuable ideas can be tricky. |
| ✔️ Generates organic traffic. |
7. Blogger outreach
Blogger outreach is when you contact other website owners and ask them to link to your site.
Outreach plays a role in most link-building campaigns, but blogger outreach is most relevant to link insertions—this is when you ask a website owner to add a link to an existing article.
Blogger outreach is effective because it’s not just about placing links—you should also seek to build relationships with others in your niche.
If you can make a good impression on a site owner, then they’ll be more likely to want to build links with you in the future.
They might even invite you to partner on projects in the future—for example, by appearing on their podcast. This can lead to even more backlinks and exposure.
⚠️ Avoid cheap outreach services |
| You get what you pay for in link building. Some blogger outreach services are so cheap that they seem too good to be true. And that’s because they are.
These services usually reach out to a limited list of low-quality websites and link farms that they have pre-existing agreements with. You’ll end up with links from AI-generated articles on websites not relevant to your niche; this won’t help you and may even harm your rankings. |
The pros and cons of blogger outreach
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ You can target authoritative, relevant websites. | ❌ Some site owners will ask for payment. |
| ✔️ Gains exposure to new audiences. | ❌ Some website owners ignore or overlook outreach emails. |
| ✔️ Generates organic traffic. | |
| ✔️ Builds relationships with other website owners in your niche. |
8. Link building agencies
If you want to boost your company’s search rankings, then hiring a link-building agency is still the most effective thing you can do.
Here are some of the benefits of using a link-building agency:
📈 They have all of the skills you need under one roof, from strategists and outreach experts to content writers and graphic designers.
📈 Agency staff live and breathe link building every day, which means they know what techniques work for modern search engines.
📈 Link-building companies care about their reputations—so you are far more likely to get high-quality links that boost your rankings than you would if you used a freelancer or built them yourself.
📈 Building links is hard work and time-consuming. Agencies have the resources to build links at scale, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.
What do you get with a link-building agency?
Service provided by link-building agencies can be broken down into four main areas:
🧠 Strategy
A good agency will ask you about your business goals and analyze your backlink profile. They’ll use this information to plan your link-building campaigns and recommend an approach that suits your needs.
📧 Outreach
Link-building agencies will naturally have existing relationships with many bloggers and websites. But they will still perform genuine outreach—this involves finding websites that best suit each individual client and pitching unique ideas to website owners.
🔗 Backlinks
Link-building agencies can usually predict how many links they will build for you each month. This helps you scale your link-building efforts and outrank competitors.
📊 Reports
The in-depth reports provided by a link-building company allow you to monitor the links being built for you and track ROI.
The pros and cons of link-building agencies
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔️ You can consistently generate backlinks from authoritative, relevant websites. | ❌ More expensive than using freelancers. |
| ✔️ Relatively little effort required. | ❌ May not suit those who want to be hands-on with their link building. |
| ✔️ Link-building campaigns usually have secondary benefits, such as increasing your exposure to new audiences. | |
| ✔️ Scale your link-building efforts. |
Build Natural, High-Quality Backlinks with Authority Builders
If you’re looking for a link-building agency to help you boost your rankings and generate more traffic to your site, then get in touch with Authority Builders.
We provide a range of link-building services that is still highly effective—even after recent Google algorithm updates.
Our link-building packages include:
✔️ ABC Plus: Our fully-customized link-building campaigns.
✔️ ABC Platinum: We build ultra-high authority links for brands on the best websites
✔️ Link audits: We audit your backlink profile and advise on SEO link-building strategy.
✔️ Citations: High-quality local and national business listings that boost your authority.
✔️ Guest posting: We write high-quality content and place it on relevant, authoritative websites.
✔️ Link insertions: We perform 100% manual outreach to provide powerful links from established domains.
✔️ Content creation: Boost your traffic with SEO-optimized content and blog articles.
Want to find out more? Book a call with our experts—they’ll answer all your questions.