The Best and Worst Link Building Strategies in 2025 (Insights from our Experience)

Link Building Can Make or Break Your SEO

Link building remains one of the most powerful levers for ranking on Google. But in 2025, the gap between what works and what gets you penalized has never been wider.

A few smart backlinks from the right places can dramatically boost your visibility. But just a handful of bad links—irrelevant, paid, or manipulative—can tank your rankings or even trigger a manual penalty from Google.

And that’s the tricky part.

You might follow what someone on YouTube calls a “secret strategy,” only to realize it goes against Google’s policies or ranking guidelines. You might even spend thousands of dollars on high-DR links that do absolutely nothing—because they’re not relevant or earned in a natural way.

So in this guide, we’ll walk through:

• ✅ The 10 best link building strategies that actually work in 2025
• ❌ The worst tactics that sound good but can hurt your site
• 💡 How to build links the smart, ethical, and scalable way
  

Whether you’re a startup, SaaS brand, agency, or affiliate site—this guide will help you avoid the common traps and focus on what really drives long-term growth.

Let’s get into it.

Best Link Building Strategies in 2025

Link building in 2025 isn’t about spamming contact forms or submitting your site to every directory under the sun. The best strategies today are a mix of creativity, research, and relevance. Let’s look at what’s actually working now—and how you can apply it to grow your authority the right way.

1. Value-Driven Outreach (Not Just “Hey, Link to Me”)

Outreach is still the backbone of link building. But what’s changed in 2025 is the expectation.

Website owners are bombarded with hundreds of emails every week—so if you don’t lead with real value, your pitch is going to the trash.

Instead of sending mass emails that scream “template,” take a value-first approach.

Ask yourself:

“Why should this person link to my page? What’s in it for them and their audience?”

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• You find a guide that’s missing a useful stat or visual → you offer yours
• You find a mention of a general topic → you offer a tool or resource that makes it better
• You genuinely admire their article → you share what stood out and suggest a complementary page
  

It’s also important to go beyond just email.

Try:

• Twitter/X DMs
• LinkedIn connections with a short intro
• Contact forms personalized like you’re talking to a human
• Video messages for high-priority targets
  

Multi-channel outreach is no longer optional—it’s how you build relationships in an inbox-saturated world.‍

Pro tip: When doing this, don’t just email—try multiple channels. Twitter DMs, LinkedIn, and even replying to newsletter content can dramatically increase your success rate. In 2025, it’s not about the channel you use, it’s about how human your message feels.

2. Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Backlinks (The Smart Way)

Why start from scratch when you can borrow from what’s already working?

Reverse engineering competitor backlinks is one of the smartest ways to uncover real, proven opportunities for your own site.

Here’s the idea:

If your competitors are ranking well, chances are they’re getting links from websites that Google already trusts. So by analyzing their backlink profile, you can find:

• 🧠 Pages that are linking to similar content (and might link to you too)
• 🔗 Gaps in your own profile—i.e., links they have that you don’t
• 💥 Content types that naturally attract links in your niche
  

Here’s how to do it:

1. Use a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz.

Plug in your competitor’s domain and head to their “Backlinks” or “Top Pages” report from link building tools such as Ahrefs.

2. Look for pages that link to multiple competitors.

This is low-hanging fruit. If someone links to 2–3 of your rivals, they’re open to linking out—and you can become the next.

3. Analyze the context.

Are they citing stats? Referencing tools? Listing resources? Whatever it is—offer them a better, fresher, or more relevant version.

4. Reach out with a tailored pitch.

Explain what you noticed and why your content would be a perfect addition or even a better fit.

✅ Bonus tip: If you’ve created something 10x better than what’s already linked, go bold and propose a replacement.
Just don’t say “Hey, replace this Adidas link with Nike” unless you’ve seriously earned it 😉

🎯 This strategy works especially well for:

• SaaS tools
• Evergreen blog content
• Free templates or tools
• Original research or statistics
  

And the best part? You’re not guessing. You’re going after opportunities that are already working in the real world.

3. Get Featured on Relevant Resource Pages

Resource pages are curated lists of useful links, tools, or content. These pages exist specifically to link out — making them some of the easiest and cleanest backlink opportunities out there.

Look for pages like:

• “Useful resources for startups”
• “Top free SEO tools”
• “Marketing resources for small businesses”
  

Use Google search operators like:

[your keyword] + inurl:resources or intitle:useful links intitle:tools

Reach out and pitch your resource with a short explanation of why it deserves a spot. Your success rate will skyrocket if your content is genuinely valuable and solves a specific pain point.

4. Digital PR & Link-Worthy Campaigns

One of the most powerful — yet underused — link building strategies is reactive digital PR. This isn’t just about publishing company updates or sending out boring press releases. It’s about jumping on breaking news in real time and inserting your brand into the conversation before anyone else does.

Let’s say there’s a big change in AI policy, or Google drops a major update — and your team has insights, data, or experience to comment on it. You can quickly reach out to journalists covering the story and offer a quote, data point, or fresh take. If you’re early and valuable, you can earn links from huge publications in hours.

Here’s the formula:

• Monitor trends using Google Alerts, X (Twitter) trends, and tools like Feedly
• Act fast: come up with a unique angle or useful insight and publish a blog post in your website
• Send a short, personalized pitch to a relevant journalist (don’t waste time with mass emails)
• Offer to provide a quote, stat, or comment they can plug directly into their article
  

This is a high-reward strategy — but timing is everything. If you’re 24 hours too late, the opportunity’s gone.

🙌 Pro tip: Keep a media list ready with 20–50 niche journalists, and have some quote-ready insights or data from your team on standby.

5. Guest Posting (The Right Way)

Guest posting still works — but only if you do it professionally.

The days of hiring a cheap freelancer, generating AI content, and blasting the same article to 100 random sites are over. That strategy gets you ignored, or worse — flagged.

If you’re serious about guest posting, here’s what actually works in 2025:

• Be the expert: Don’t outsource your credibility. If you have real experience or unique insights, showcase that. Editors want authentic contributions, not content mills.
• Don’t pitch for links — pitch for value. Reputable websites don’t care about your backlink; they care about how your content helps their audience.
• Build trust before you pitch: Follow the site, engage with their content, and understand their tone and audience.
• Show them you’re not just link-dropping: Share your credentials, writing samples, and the reason why your guide would be valuable. Make it clear this isn’t just a “publish and vanish” thing.

Legitimate businesses are wary of outside content — and for good reason. So, if you’re pitching a blog like G2, Hubspot, or Search Engine Journal, you have to prove why you’re different from the hundreds of others who are just trying to get a link.

Want real results? Focus on relationships, not just guest posts. Write one great post that gets traffic and builds trust — instead of ten low-quality ones that no one reads.

6. Strategic Content Collaboration (Play the Long Game)

One of the most underrated yet scalable link-building strategies we’ve used at LinkyJuice is building long-term content partnerships with people who regularly contribute to multiple publications.

There are many marketers, SEOs, content managers, and PR folks out there who are actively writing guest posts, industry thought pieces, or roundup articles across different sites — not just once, but as part of their job. If you can build a genuine relationship with them, you can consistently be included in their content across multiple platforms.

Here’s how we do it:

• Identify contributors who write regularly for multiple blogs or online magazines (you’ll often find them bylines like “Contributor at X, Y, Z”).
• Reach out personally — not with a pitch, but with value. Offer unique data, insights, quotes, or visuals they can use to enrich their content.
• Once trust is built, they’ll start looping you in automatically when planning future articles — we’ve had partnerships where we were featured in 10+ articles from a single contact, just because we stayed valuable.
• You can even create a “collaboration pack” — with brand info, bio, expert quotes, and relevant pages — to make it easier for them to include you without back-and-forth.
  

It’s like earning recurring links without doing the cold outreach every time. Play the long game, provide value, and become their go-to expert.

Win-win.

7. Link Bait & Evergreen Assets

Create something so good people want to link to it:

• Ultimate guides
• Free tools
• Industry stats pages
• Visual assets like infographics or charts
• Templates or swipe files
  

The key?

Make it the most helpful version of that thing on the internet.

Then promote it everywhere:

Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack groups, newsletters, Reddit — wherever your audience hangs out.

8. Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions

Sometimes, you’re already being talked about — but not linked.

Use tools like Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, or Google Alerts to find brand mentions with no link. Reach out, thank them, and politely ask if they could add a link to help readers find your site.

Again, as we discussed in our link building for SEO guide this works best for already known brands. If your just starting no body will mention you.

These are some of the easiest backlinks you’ll ever land.

9. Recover Lost or Broken Backlinks

Even great links can disappear due to:

• Site migrations
• Page deletions
• Content updates
  

Use Ahrefs’ “Lost Backlinks” or Semrush’s audit tool to spot these. Then either:

• Redirect the old URL to a live, relevant page
• Recreate a better version of the lost page and reach out to reclaim the link.

⚠️ Worst Link Building Strategies to Avoid

Not all links are good links. Here’s what to avoid in 2025:

❌ Buying Links Blindly

Paying $100 for a random blog post on a DR 80 site sounds good — until you realize it’s part of a PBN, has fake traffic, and is deindexed next month.

👉 If you’re going to buy links, hire a trusted agency (like LinkyJuice.com) that uses real outreach and follows best practices. What matters isn’t just if you buy links—it’s how you do it.

❌ Link Exchanges & Reciprocal Linking

“Link to me and I’ll link back” might sound fair — but Google sees right through it. Repeated reciprocal linking can trigger penalties or nullify your SEO gains.

Instead, focus on one-way links from trusted sites.

❌ Low-Quality Directories and Profiles

Submitting your site to 1000 directories used to work in 2005. Now it just dilutes your backlink profile with spam and wastes your time.

❌ Automated Link Building Tools

Anything promising hundreds of links in a few days is likely:

• A private blog network (PBN)
• Automated spam
• Comment links
  

This is a first class ticket to a manual Google penalty. :D

Avoid at all costs.

❌ Over-Optimized Anchors

Stuffing your backlinks with the same exact-match keyword (“best SEO agency in LA”) is a major red flag. Mix up your anchor text naturally.

For more on anchor strategy, check out this guide.

Final Thoughts: Build for Value, Not Just Volume

Link building in 2025 is about quality, trust, and intent.

Great backlinks come from building relationships, solving problems, and creating things worth sharing—not gaming the system.

If you’re overwhelmed or want to scale with confidence, LinkyJuice can help you get powerful backlinks without the stress, spam, or shady tactics.