The Top 7 Link Acquisition Strategies to Take Into 2025

Are you still using link-building tactics from 2011?

If you are, you’re probably having a hard time staying competitive on Google. 

That’s because link acquisition is constantly changing and evolving due to Google’s algorithm updates. 

Many websites learned this the hard way with the now infamous March 2024 Core Update. 

The update caused countless websites to see major dips in their organic traffic and keyword rankings, especially for those still using outdated techniques. 

While spammy link-building practices like private blog networks (PBNs) haven’t worked for quite some time, there’s more of an emphasis on quality and originality than ever before (especially in light of AI chatbots capable of generating content). 

That means SEOs need to know the most safe and effective ways to acquire backlinks as we move into 2025. 

In this article, we’ll teach you the 7 best link acquisition tactics to take into the future, so stay tuned to learn more! 

What is Link Acquisition?

Link acquisition, commonly referred to as link-building, is the process of acquiring backlinks from other websites in your industry.

What’s a backlink?

It’s a link on another website that directs to one of your web pages. 

While that may seem simple, backlinks are a big deal for search engine algorithms. 

This is because Google (and other search engines like Bing) use backlinks as votes of confidence for the credibility of a web page. 

Why’s that?

Here’s a quick explanation.

In order for Google to have a great user experience, it needs to ensure that it only ranks high-quality, accurate content in its search results. 

Otherwise, its search results would be filled with misinformation and false claims made to sell products. 

That’s especially harmful when people search for subjects related to their health, finances, and happiness, which is why Google has a special category for those types of pages (it’s called YMYL or Your Money, Your Life for short). 

Thus, Google uses backlinks (and a ton of other ranking factors) to determine the level of accuracy and trustworthiness a domain has. 

The thinking goes like this: If trusted websites in your field are willing to link to your content, it’s a sign that you also produce good content. 

For example, a major website like CNBC doesn’t link out to just anyone. So, if you’re able to secure a backlink from them, it will provide the web page containing the link with an extremely strong ‘credibility vote.’ 

In the SEO world, we refer to this ranking power as ‘link juice.’ 

So, if you want to achieve high rankings for your content, then you’ll need to acquire backlinks from relevant websites in your niche. 

This is the main reason why the link acquisition process is necessary. 

Backlinks are a major ranking factor on Google, so you’ll need to build them if you want to outrank your competitors. 

What makes a strong backlink?

Now that you know why link acquisition matters, it’s crucial to know that you shouldn’t target backlinks from just any website. 

There are certain criteria another website must meet in order for them to be a suitable backlink target.

If a site doesn’t meet these criteria, the backlink will not impact your SEO. 

Here are the main factors that determine the quality of a backlink. 

Relevance 

First and foremost, a backlink must hold some type of relevance to your content. 

For instance, if you sell shoes, you would want to build backlinks from shoe-related websites. If you try to build backlinks from video game websites, they won’t count. Google will notice that the backlink is irrelevant, and its impact will be devalued. 

If you’re selling shoes, there’s no reason why a video game website would want to link to your content, and doing so could cause confusion. 

After all, it wouldn’t make sense to randomly link to an online shoe store in the middle of an article about the game Elden Ring. 

Relevant backlinks, on the other hand, benefit both search engines and users. 

Instead of linking back to your site from video game articles, a better idea would be to target websites run by shoe aficionados. For one, their readers would actually care about your shoes, and adding a backlink could generate referral traffic. 

For two, relevant backlinks are what Google wants to see, so you’ll get link juice out of the deal. 

The two types of relevance you should target are:

• Direct relevance. A website is directly relevant to your website when it deals with the same topics, like shoe news sites, shoe forums, and online shoe magazines. 

• Contextual relevance. A backlink can also hold contextual relevance, which is where you build a backlink that isn’t normally relevant to yours but is in context. As an example, consider the aforementioned video game website. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t want to build backlinks from it. However, if they have an article all about footwear in video games, now it makes sense. So, if an unrelated website mentions your topic in passing, it’s fair game for a backlink. 

Authority 

Next, it’s important to target authoritative backlinks since they’ll have the strongest impact on your rankings. 

How can you tell if a website is authoritative or not?

You can by checking its Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) scores. 

Dofollow 

Lastly, backlinks can either be dofollow or nofollow, both of which are HTML attributes. 

Dofollow backlinks signal to Google that the backlink should count toward your SEO, meaning you’ll receive the full serving of link juice from it. 

Nofollow backlinks tell Google that the link should not carry an endorsement, although a minimal amount of link juice will still pass through. 

The 7 Best Link Acquisition Tactics for 2025 

Okay, now that you’re familiar with the basics, it’s time to learn the best ways to acquire valuable backlinks in 2025. 

These techniques will help you generate relevant, authoritative, dofollow backlinks that will directly impact your search rankings. 

We’ve discarded outdated tactics that focus on quantity over quality, as Google emphasizes quality and relevance above all else.

There are also some classic techniques on this list because they continue to yield amazing results. We say, use them until they stop working! 

Tactic #1: Broken link-building 

First, we’ll explore a tactic that’s been around for a while but still kicks butt, and that’s fixing broken links on other websites. 

However, the broken links you fix must come from relevant websites or the backlinks you build won’t impact your rankings. 

It’s normal for links to break over long periods of time, and there are many reasons for this. It could be that the site owner recently changed their URL structure and forgot to add redirects to the old URLs. Or they could have recently migrated to a new CMS, which is a notorious cause for broken links. 

Regardless of the reasons why, most websites have at least a few broken links. 

The good news is you can perform a public service and benefit your SEO by:

1. Pointing out broken links to site owners
2. Offering a link to a similar page on your site as a replacement 

For example, if you find a broken link for a blog about a topic you’ve also written about, you could reach out to the site owner and tell them that you have a quick and easy replacement. 

The chances are the site owner will appreciate this, as nobody likes having broken links on their site (they’re bad for SEO and users). As a bonus, you’ll pick up a backlink to one of your pages, which will help your SEO. 

How can you find broken links to target for backlinks?

There are a few ways, including using Ahrefs and an SEO spider like Screaming Frog (which has a free version). 

How to find broken links on other websites using Ahrefs 

Here’s how to uncover any website’s broken links with the SEO platform Ahrefs. 

First, you need to compile a list of relevant websites to target, as you won’t want to check random websites. 

Instead, do some research to find websites in your field that you want to target for backlinks. The criteria should be:

1. Sites that hold direct or contextual relevance to yours. 
2. Sites that have relatively high domain authority scores. 

You can use our free domain authority checker tool to vet websites for backlink opportunities. 

Simply enter your target URLs into the tool (one URL per line) and hit View Moz Metrics to see each website’s domain authority score. 

Once you have a list of target websites, log into Ahrefs and navigate to the Site Explorer tool. 

From there, go to Outgoing Links > Broken Links. 

Voila, you’ll now see a complete list of the website’s broken links. 

Check each one to see if you have suitable replacements for the broken page, or if you can create one relatively quickly (such as creating a new blog post). 

Tactic #2: Guest posting 

If link tactics were radio stations, guest posting would be the golden oldies. 

While it’s one of the oldest link acquisition tactics, it still remains one of the most effective. 

Guest posting involves the following steps:

1. Finding websites in your niche that accept guest posts 
2. Vetting those websites to ensure they’re suitable guest post targets 
3. Pitching a compelling idea to the editor/site owner and getting it approved 
4. Actually writing the post and getting it published (and deciding on where to add your backlink)

As you can see, there are quite a few variables that can make guest posting tricky at times. 

The best way to find websites that accept guest posts is to use search operators on Google. By encasing search terms in quotations, Google will only display results containing those exact words in that exact order. 

Therefore, searching for things like (your niche) + “guest post” will help you quickly find websites accepting guest posts. 

Terms to try out include:

1. “Write for us”
2. “Contributed by”
3. “Guest blogs”
4. “Guest post guidelines” 
5. “Submit a post”

As a quick example, here’s what happens when we search for gardening “guest posts” on Google:

Check out our in-depth guide on guest posting to learn tons of tips for conducting email outreach and pitching post ideas. 

Tactic #3: Link insertions (also called niche edits) 

This tactic is one that’s gained enormous popularity in recent years, despite being known about for quite some time. 

A link insertion is where you ask a site owner to insert one of your backlinks into an existing piece of content. 

It’s an excellent way to build backlinks because:

1. Existing pieces of content will already appear in Google’s index, meaning you won’t have to wait for a new post to get indexed (which can take several weeks). This means link insertions tend to take effect and impact rankings quicker than other link-building tactics. 
2. You don’t have to create any new content to obtain a backlink. 

We love link insertions and target them as much as possible. 

To help you understand how it works, here’s a page out of our playbook (no peeking at the other pages, though):

Look for instances where it makes sense to link to one of your pages. 

The toughest part of link insertions is convincing site owners to add one of your backlinks to an existing piece. In order to get a ‘yes,’ there has to be something in it for them, too. 

For us, we love to target instances where it makes perfect sense to link to one of our client’s pages, most commonly something they sell. 

For instance, if an article mentions watches and you sell watches, adding a link to one of your product pages is a win-win because it also provides value for the website’s users. 

Tactic #4: Unlinked brand mentions 

There are times when writers mention a brand online but don’t include a link back to their website. 

These are called unlinked brand mentions, and with some detective work and outreach, you can turn them into backlinks. 

Here’s how to find them using Ahrefs. 

Using the Content Explorer tool, enter your brand name plus the formula ‘-site:yoursite.com’ to ensure your web pages don’t appear in the results:

After you hit the Search button, there’s still one step left. You need to enter your website’s URL into the Highlight Unlinked filter so that the results will display websites that mentioned your brand but didn’t link back to your site. 

Once that’s done, you’ll have a list of unlinked brand mentions to target for outreach! 

Tactic #5: Create linkable assets to attract backlinks naturally 

Next, you can generate backlinks while you sleep by creating assets that others want to link to, such as helpful infographics and videos. 

Research shows that infographics generate 3x more backlinks than any other content type on social media, so it’s wise to invest heavily in them. 

In particular, try to create visually engaging infographics that provide helpful statistics related to your industry. Bloggers are always hungry for stats to back up the claims they make in their articles, and infographics are their go-to. 

Besides infographics, free tools are also backlink magnets. 

Take it from us, our suite of free SEO tools generates TONS of backlinks for our website, and they’re some of our most valuable links, too. These tools let users analyze their competitors, research keywords, and perform lots of other SEO functions for free, which is why they’re so popular. 

You can do the same for your industry, too. Try to brainstorm some free tools (that aren’t too difficult to create) that your audience could benefit from. Common examples include different types of calculators, logo generators, and document templates. 

Tactic #6: Image link-building 

Here’s a bit of an unorthodox technique. 

Did you know that you can create URLs specifically for images so that you can build backlinks with them?

It’s called image link-building, and it’s the best way to capitalize off popular images that you’ve created. 

By using tools like Imgur and SmugMug, you can create individual URLs for your images. From there, you’ll acquire a backlink every time someone shares one of your images. 

The best types of images to use for this technique include:

1. Infographics 
2. Product photos (especially if you have high-res photos of hot-selling items!) 
3. Branded logos and badges 
4. Visual maps, statistics, and graphs 

Tactic #7: Digital PR (public relations) 

The last tactic we’ll explore is digital PR, which is an entire category of its own. While digital PR and link-building share many similarities (a major goal of digital PR campaigns is to build links), they are two distinct practices. 

However, digital PR does contain some truly effective link-building techniques, such as distributing press releases. 

A press release is an official statement delivered to the media regarding a newsworthy update about your business. 

Digital press releases are great ways to:

1. Build backlinks to your site
2. Appeal to journalists for a press spotlight
3. Generate referral traffic 

However, you have to make sure that the focus of the press release is truly newsworthy. Examples include hiring a new CEO, adding to your facilities, or adding a new department. 

Also, you should not mention time-sensitive events if your goal is to build backlinks, as you’ll want the press release to stay online for as long as possible. 

There are lots of options for press release distribution, including our own service. As an added bonus, our team can write press releases for you, too. 

Start Acquiring Valuable Backlinks Today 

Okay, that’s a ton of information to digest at once, so here’s a brief recap:

1. Backlinks are one of Google’s top ranking factors. 
2. High-quality backlinks are relevant and authoritative. 
3. Top tactics for acquiring links include guest posts, fixing broken links, distributing press releases, targeting unlinked brand mentions, and using image link-building. 

Do you need help acquiring the backlinks you need to outrank competitors?

If so, then you should leave it up to our team! Our Link Outreach and Link Insertion services are the best in the business. You can also reach out for a free SEO consultation to create a custom solution based on your needs, so feel free to get in touch.