How to Get Backlinks: Step-by-Step Guide

What Is a Backlink, Really?

A backlink is simply a link from another website to yours. When a blog, news site, or business links to your page, search engines treat it as a vote of confidence — someone else found your page worth pointing their readers to.

There are two types you will hear about constantly:

• Dofollow links — the standard kind. They can pass ranking value to your page. These are the ones people usually mean when they say “backlinks.”
• Nofollow links — these carry a tag that asks search engines not to pass ranking value. Since 2019, Google has treated nofollow — along with the related sponsored and UGC attributes — as hints rather than strict rules. That means Google may choose to consider them in some cases, but a nofollow link is never a reliable way to gain rankings. Nofollow links still send referral traffic and add diversity to your link profile, so don’t ignore them. See Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links for how these attributes work.

The honest truth: one editorial link from a respected site in your industry can be worth more than a hundred links from random directories nobody visits. If you remember one thing from this guide, make it that. As a rule, quality beats quantity. If you want the full picture of why, read our guide on the benefits of backlinks.

What Makes a Backlink “Quality”?

Before you start building anything, you need to know what you’re aiming for. A quality backlink usually has four things going for it:

• Relevance — the linking site is related to your topic. A link from a cooking blog to a plumbing site looks odd to Google. A link from a marketing blog to an SEO agency makes sense.
• Real traffic — the linking page actually gets visitors. A link nobody ever sees is worth very little, even if the domain looks strong on paper.
• Editorial placement — the link sits inside real content, put there by an editor or author who chose it. Links buried in footers, sidebars, or author boxes carry far less weight.
• Natural anchor text — the clickable words read naturally. If every link to your site says “best SEO services Karachi” in exact-match text, that’s a footprint, not a strategy. Branded and natural anchors should dominate.

A natural link profile usually includes a mix of link types, but there is no required dofollow/nofollow ratio to aim for — focus on earning relevant, editorial links and the mix takes care of itself. Judge every opportunity against those four points before you spend time on it. If it fails all four, skip it.

Method 1: Guest Posting (That Still Works)

Guest posting gets called dead every year, and every year it keeps working — because the version that works was never about mass-blasting the same pitch to a thousand blogs. It is about writing something genuinely useful for one specific audience.

Here is the process that works:

• Find the right sites. Search for your topic plus “write for us,” “guest post,” or “contribute.” But don’t stop there — the best targets often don’t advertise guest posts at all. Look at where your competitors have guest posted, and check the blogs you already read.
• Read before you pitch. Spend ten minutes on the site. What do they publish? What have they covered recently? What is missing? Your pitch should reference a real gap, not a generic “I would love to contribute.”
• Pitch one specific idea. Not “I can write about SEO.” Instead: “How local businesses can track calls from Google Business Profile” — a headline, two lines on what it covers, and why their readers would care.
• Write the best piece on that topic. This is the part most people skip. A thin guest post gets you a thin link. A genuinely good one gets you invited back, shared, and sometimes linked to again by other sites.
• Link naturally. One link back to a relevant page on your site, inside the content, where it helps the reader. That is it. Two or three keyword-stuffed links in a guest post is how you get the post rejected — or worse, the link ignored. And one line to respect: never pay for a guest post placement just to pass ranking credit, and don’t build exact-match anchors at scale — that turns a legitimate tactic into a manipulative one.

Start with smaller blogs in your niche. They reply faster, the bar is lower, and the links still count. As your portfolio grows, bigger sites take you seriously.

Method 2: Broken Link Building

This is one of the most reliable ways to get backlinks, because you are helping the other site owner fix a problem.

The idea is simple: websites link to pages that no longer exist. You find those dead links, create (or point to) a good replacement page, and email the site owner saying, “Hey, this link on your page is broken — here is a working alternative.”

• Find broken links. Use a free broken link checker extension, or search for resource pages in your niche and check their outbound links. Pages that list “helpful resources” are gold mines for this.
• Have something worth linking to. This only works if your replacement page is genuinely good. If you don’t have one yet, write it first — a solid guide on the topic the dead page used to cover.
• Send a short, helpful email. Point out the broken link, suggest your page as a replacement, and stop there. No life story, no flattery paragraph. Site owners get dozens of these emails, and the short, helpful ones are the ones most likely to get replies.

Response rates vary a lot — they depend on the quality of your pitch, how relevant your page is, and how busy the site owner is. Don’t judge a campaign by a handful of emails. It is a numbers game, but only if every email is genuinely personalised.

Method 3: Digital PR and Expert Quotes

Journalists and bloggers constantly need expert quotes. Platforms that connect journalists with expert sources let reporters post requests and experts answer them. Answer a relevant query well, and you can land a link from a news site or major blog.

• Only answer queries in your field. A generic answer to everything gets ignored. A sharp, specific answer to one query in your expertise gets used.
• Answer fast and completely. Journalists work on deadlines. A complete, quotable answer in the first reply beats a “let me know if you need anything” every time.
• Give something quotable. One clear opinion, one useful fact, one short explanation. If your answer needs editing down to be usable, it probably won’t be used.

This method takes patience, but the links it produces — editorial, from real publications — are among the strongest you can get. They also tend to do more for your brand than directory listings.

Method 4: Resource Pages

Many sites maintain “resources,” “tools,” or “helpful links” pages for their audience. Getting listed on a relevant one is a straightforward, legitimate backlink.

• Find them. Search your topic plus “resources,” “helpful links,” or “recommended tools.”
• Check the bar. If the page lists spammy or dead sites, skip it. If it lists quality resources, your page needs to belong in that company.
• Pitch the fit, not yourself. Explain in one or two lines why your page helps their readers. That is the entire pitch.

Resource page links are rarely the strongest links you will ever get, but they are real, relevant, and they add up. They are also a good starting point if your site is new and has almost no links yet.

Method 5: Create Something Worth Linking To

This is the slowest method and the most powerful one. People link to pages that are useful, original, or interesting — so make one.

• Original data or a small study. Even a simple survey of your industry, or data pulled from your own work, gives other writers something to cite. Cited pages earn links on their own.
• A free tool or template. Calculators, checklists, templates — anything that solves a small problem gets bookmarked, shared, and linked.
• The definitive guide. If every article on a topic is thin, a genuinely complete one stands out. It does not need to be the longest — it needs to be the most useful.

This is not “publish and pray.” Once the page exists, tell people about it: share it where your audience hangs out, mention it to sites that linked to weaker versions of the same topic, and include it in your outreach. Good content earns links faster when someone actually sees it.

Method 6: Free Backlinks That Are Actually Worth It

There are free backlinks you can get today, and they are worth having — as long as you understand their limits:

• Business profiles. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and genuine industry directories. These are citations as much as links, and they matter especially for local businesses.
• Social profiles. Your profiles on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and similar platforms link back to your site. Mostly nofollow, but they are natural parts of a real brand’s footprint.
• Community participation. Genuinely helpful answers on forums and Q&A sites, with a link only when it truly helps the person asking. Spammy self-promotion gets removed and can hurt you.
• Wikipedia. Yes, you can sometimes earn a Wikipedia link — but only by improving an article with a genuinely useful, citable source. And be realistic: Wikipedia links carry the nofollow attribute, so they are not a reliable source of ranking value. Their real value is referral traffic and credibility, not rankings.

Treat free links as the foundation, not the strategy. They make your profile look natural while your earned editorial links do the heavy lifting.

What to Avoid (This Part Matters More Than You Think)

Most backlink damage is self-inflicted. Avoid these, no matter how tempting the offer looks:

• Bulk link packages — “1,000 backlinks for $10” is not a deal. If a link can be bought in bulk by anyone, it is unlikely to help you — and it may hurt, including putting your site at risk of losing rankings or, in serious cases, receiving a manual action from Google.
• Private blog networks (PBNs) — networks of sites built only to sell links. Google works to detect these networks, and sites that benefited from their links can lose that value — and in some cases may face a manual action. Not every linked site is penalised, but the risk is real and the links rarely hold their value. See Google’s spam policies on link spam for what counts as manipulative.
• Link farms and automated spam — mass directory submissions, blog comment spam, forum profile spam. These tactics stopped working years ago, and today they are more likely to hurt than help.
• Exact-match anchor schemes — if all your links use the same money keyword as anchor text, that pattern itself is a red flag.

If you already have bad links pointing at your site, start by asking the site owners to remove the worst ones. Google itself advises that most sites never need the Disavow tool. Consider it only as an advanced step — for example, if you have received a manual action, or you see a clear pattern of spammy, manipulative links you cannot get removed — and use it carefully, because disavowing the wrong links can do more harm than good. See Google’s guidance on disavowing links. Our guide on how to increase domain authority fast covers how a clean link profile fits into the bigger picture.

How Long Until Backlinks Work?

The honest answer: it depends, and anyone promising you an exact date is guessing.

Google has to discover the link, crawl the linking page, and factor it in — that alone can take weeks. For a new or low-authority site, the first quality links sometimes start showing movement within a few months — but timelines vary widely with competition, existing authority, and many other factors, and no specific result or timeframe can be guaranteed. For competitive keywords, it is a longer game: consistent link building over months, not a one-time push.

What you can control is the input: a steady pace of real, relevant links, month after month. What you can’t control is the exact day rankings move. Track your progress by the links you earn and the referral traffic they send. Rankings may improve over time, but they are never guaranteed and they move on their own schedule.

If you’d rather have a team handle the outreach while you run your business, our link building services are built around manual outreach to real websites — no farms, no PBNs, no spam. And if your goal is specifically to lift your site’s authority metrics, see our increase domain rating service.