Is Link Building Important for SEO and AI Search in 2025?

SEO changed massively with the HCU in September 2023 and the rise of AI Mode and AI Search. The old ways of proving your authority with 250 secondary keywords and LSI words, and the most backlinks from the highest DA site, aren’t going to cut it anymore.

Link building is still important in 2025, but the types of links we are building and the ways we build them have changed. You don’t need 20 links from a DA 50 site that 1 person visits per year. You need high traffic and niche-relevant links to actually drive traffic to your website.

How do we get those links?

Guest posting (but not the way we used to), going on podcasts and doing Youtube interviews, and getting cited by actual authorities, not just random link farms with a high DA.

Getting old-school backlinks from ghost town sites with a high DA is just as spammy as stuffing your post with 27 versions of your long tail keyword.

It’s time to modernize, and steal my PR meets SEO method of link building that won’t get your site blacklisted by Google!

I’m a lazy gal, so I promise this isn’t a “write 100 posts a month” or “spend 4 days a week guesting on podcasts” strategy. You can easily fit it into your already busy business plan!

What the Google Algorithm Leak Taught Us About How Google Judges “Authority”

In 2024, Google’s algorithm leaked. We got to learn about the 14,000 attributes (yes, I went through all of them!) that their algorithm and human evaluators go through when evaluating sites.

No surprise: domain authority (DA) wasn’t on the list.

That’s because DA is an invented metric by Moz to approximate the perceived authority of a website. And it kinda worked … until Google got an upgrade.

DA is evaluated by:

• Number of keyword rankings and their positions
• The DA of the sites linking back to you
• The number of sites linking back to you
• …kinda the age of the site? But that mostly plays into the number of links and past keyword rankings

Notice how the quality of those sites isn’t really considered?

That’s why “link farms” popped up. They’re basically ghost town sites with high DAs that people would sell backlinks from so it looked like a DA 70 site was linking to you … except no one ever visited that site, it didn’t rank anymore (maybe it did 10 years ago), and it’s content was true garbage.

The algorithm leak showed us that clicks from other sites matters far more than the “authority” score of these other sites.

It’s better to do a guest post for a site with 10k pageviews, a DA of 10, and a relevant niche than to do one for a DA 70 site that gets 100 pageviews.

It’s like having 10,000 fake bot followers on Instagram versus 10 followers who actually like and comment on your post.

Quality >>> quantity!

Now we know we need to prioritize link building that gets us in front of our ideal audience so we can get them to click over to our site.

How to Get Legit Backlinks Without Hiring a PR Team

The new version of “getting backlinks” is basically just doing PR. But you don’t need to hire a $6k per month PR team to get them!

These are all the methods I’ve used, and seen success with, to get links to my website that actually improve my authority and drive traffic to my site.

1. Podcast Guesting / Youtube Guesting

Being a guest on a podcast or Youtube channel is easily my favourite, and the most effective way I’ve found, to get a high authority backlink.

Both platforms have their own SEO, so it’s the gift that keeps on giving for literal years after you’re on the show.

Youtube and most podcast platforms have insanely high authority metrics, but that’s not where the magic comes from with this type of backlink. It comes from the personal nature of a video or audio interview where you are the only guest the audience hears.

People actually see your face or hear your voice and get to know you, unlike a kinda impersonal guest post, where they may not even realize it’s you until the end of the post.

It’s pretty low-effort to guest, since most shows are 30-60 minutes and don’t require a ton of prep ahead of time.

💡 Pro Tip: Offer a freebie at the end of the episode so people either need to click the URL or go directly to your site. Both will boost your SEO! Use a short link like “sheknowsseo.co/lead” and host the opt-in form on your site to benefit from the backlink.

2. Guest Posts

Guest posts were my favourite method for getting backlinks that grew my DA in the pre-HCU version of SEO, but now they’re tied for second.

Guest posts are basically the same as writing a post for your own website, except you give it away to another site. They post it on their website, with credit to you, and include usually 1-3 backlinks to your website.

You can get more links out of this, and usually get them directly the posts on your site that you want to boost.

However, you need to properly evaluate the site to make sure it’s a good fit. Don’t just look at their DA score on Moz and go off of that!

Most people take longer than 30-60 minutes to write a post, so it’s likely going to take you longer than guesting on a podcast.

💡 Pro Tip: Make sure the website has traffic, no matter what their DA is! I usually aim for 10k pageviews per month, minimum, according to free tools online. These tools approximate, so even if it overstates the amount, that means they likely have at least 5k pageviews. You can choose whatever number you want for your “minimum”.

3. News Mentions

I would have put this second, but news mentions are harder to get than guest posts so that pushes them down to my 3rd favourite method for growing your authority.

A news mention is when a high authority, typically “news” website, mentions or links to your website.

There are a few ways to get these mentions:

• HARO – reply to pitches from journalists
• Qwoted – reply to pitched from journalists
• Linkifi – hire experts to source these linked mentions for you
• Twitter/Threads/LinkedIn – pitch journalists directly or reply to pitches

I’ve had journalists pitch me many times after finding my website ranking #1 on Google.

SEO can be it’s own PR engine! But you need some authority first.

Check out my interview with Chris of Linkifi here with some great tips for pitching news sources.

💡 Pro Tip: Jumpstart your authority with Linkifi! I’ve hired them to get me some epic news links, that have actually resulted in a massive influx of traffic. 10/10 recommend them if you don’t have time to do any link building of your own. They’re the only version of “buying” backlinks I endorse, because it’s legit PR!

4. Create a Case Study

I’m not talking about client case studies to sell your services. I mean actually testing something and sharing the results.

I run case studies constantly and share them with my Profitable Part-Time Blogger students. …and then if I remember/have time, I share some publicly, too.

Here’s an example of one I did to figure out the best way to grow your email list.

You’re probably already running tests like this anyway! Just publish your results (especially if you can include stats or screenshots of proof) and share it with your audience.

I’ve had a lot of people interview me or link back to me because of the case studies I run.

And I’m not the only one! Major sites like SEMrush and Backlinko do this regularly to get mentions from every other SEO site online.

💡 Pro Tip: A case study doesn’t have to be about blogging! You can run a case study by comparing 3 pair of sneakers when you run a marathon, or testing what happens to your hair after using different kinds of curl cream for a month. Basically, just test and compare things in any niche! (And if you do that curl cream one, please email it to me cause I’m always looking for better products!)

5. Do Primary Research

We can’t always test everything ourselves. And even when we do, we won’t know if it applies to everyone. That’s where doing some primary research comes in!

Rather than synthesizing what’s already out there in a million articles, get new data to share.

Run focus groups, collect info in a survey, do some interviews with first-hand sources. Then analyze and share this data in a blog post.

I did this for my Journey by Mediavine analysis to see if it’s actually an ad network worth joining.

It’s gotten me backlinks, traffic, and a lot of new students (that one was kinda unexpected!).

I definitely went overboard with that one, but many people do versions of this by just sending their audience a survey once a year to get some data.

💡 Pro Tip: If you don’t have an audience of over 1k yet, ask others to share it or make a prize for participating! I often give a freebie if someone fills in a survey to incentivize them to complete it. Or you can give a bonus for sharing the survey to their audience/on their social media.

6. “Invent” a Strategy

I have given Jamie I.F. so many backlinks over the years for his SPEAR intro framework.

(Look! I just gave him another one right there!)

He basically invented a method of intro writing that is epic. So I share it regularly to help people get better at intros (cause a bad intro is my 2nd biggest pet peeve for blogging, just after not having alt text for your images!).

He didn’t have to get an engineering degree or get out a welder. He just simplified his processes down into something repeatable and then wrote a blog post about it.

I’ve done something similar with my Helpful Hermione Business Growth Method.

People share it because it’s a synthesized, step by step system that others can repeat.

And because it works!

💡 Pro Tip: I make mine an email freebie, but you’ll get more links back to your business if it’s freely available in a blog post or as a Youtube video.

💡 Bonus Pro Tip: You can even use a tool like Scribe (free plan is plenty!) to show you the steps of something you already do, and then use ChatGPT to come up with a catchy name for it. Put it in a blog post, and share it around!

7. Build Real Connections

I know, I know, most of us get into blogging or running online businesses because we don’t want to speak to people IRL. I’m an intense introvert, so seriously, I’m with ya!

… but you will make amazing connections in person and end up getting some epic backlinks.

I’ve gotten some of my coolest opportunities for guest spots, news mentions, and backlinks just from attending conferences and meetups in person.

You don’t even need to pay to attend stuff to make this happen! Set up a local meetup at a coffee shop or a diner, share it in some local business Facebook Groups, and share it with your newsletter.

💡 Pro Tip: Attending an IRL conference is going to do the most for you. You don’t need to be some networking robot. Actually make friends! That’ll help you grow the most. Friends link back to friends, cause they know how epic you are. I’ve legit never gone to an event to get backlinks or “grow my network” or whatever. I just make real connections with some epic people – usually about dogs or food – and then things blossom from there.

8. Breaking News / Get an Exclusive

You can break news, even if you’re not a journalist.

Tomiko Harvey attended the DC Google Creator Summit and shared what they told her about SEO in the world of AI Mode. She’s gotten countless backlinks because she has exclusive information that no one else does!

Rand Fishkin and Mike King released the Google algorithm leak documents. Even though my post outranked them for the entirety of that being viral (…let’s be real, Google was suppressing them cause they were salty about the leak. I’m not just “that good”), they leaked it so we all linked back to them as the source.

Every industry has breaking news and exclusive information that can be shared. It’s not just SEO!

9. Be Highly Quotable

People are lazy, let’s be real. We often go looking for quotes that we can use in our articles without having to go do a million interviews.

I’ve been quoted from my Youtube videos, my Threads posts, and my blog posts, many times! People then cite me or just give me a brand mention.

Both boost my authority.

How do we get quotable?

Please don’t start speaking in weird parables or haikus. It’s all about getting to the point in 1-2 sentences.

State your opinion, perspective, or experience in a succinct way.

It’s helpful if you have an unpopular opinion, new take on something, or a different way of explaining things. My social-anxiety induced creation of “SEO blue balls” on a podcast still gets me references online because it’s a unique (and kinda insane) take on topical authority and internal linking.

10. *Potentially* Getting Social Media References

This matters more for AI Search like ChatGPT Search, but it also kind of matters for SEO according to the Google algorithm leak.

Have other people mention you (tag you, or share your link(s)) on social media.

LLMs look at your presence across the web. They can see links and mentions of your brand on most social media sites (X or Twitter is a grey area because they try to ban access for a lot of search engines).

Google’s algo leak showed us that they pay attention to how people find your site, and social media is a big part of that. The link clicks from social media seem to act pretty similarly to backlinks from other websites.

It’s not going to affect your DA, but if you can get people to tag you or share your links on social media, I have a theory that even without getting traffic this does boost your overall authority.

💡 Pro Tip: If you ever have a speaking gig, get people to take a photo of you posing and tag you in order to get an exclusive freebie. This gets you great photos, a lot of engagement on socials, exposure, and lets you start a DM convo with them to interact 1:1.

11. Broken Link Building … Sometimes

Broken link building is where you find links from Website A to a 404 page on Website B, or even Website C that no longer exists. You email Website A letting them know this link is broken and offer them a link to a relevant piece of content on your website instead.

This used to be a black hat SEO (aka. spammy) technique where you’d use the Wayback Machine to see the dead page, copy the content to your site, maybe rephrase it a bit, and then send your link over.

It was usually done at scale … which meant bad quality content.

Even if you do it with a legit article, it’s got a low success rate. I know that when I get pitches like this (they’re usually so clearly spammy with “Dear Sir” or “Hi Sheknowsseo.co”), I delete them and the broken link.

I’ve never had a legit one that I did replace with someone’s link, but I know some people say this does work.

The only place I’ve seen it properly work is with “needs citation” mentions on Wikipedia. Here’s how you can snag those backlinks.

If you want to give broken link building a go, here are the steps:

1. Find a target site that you want a backlink from
2. Enter their site into brokenlinkcheck.com. (Here’s how to use it)
3. Check each instance of a broken link to see where it is on their site and what they are trying to link to
4. Send them any content on your site that would fit, or write a new piece of content and send it to them
5. Wait and follow up in 14 days. If they don’t respond after this, leave them alone

12. Claiming Your Site Off-Site

A really underrated way to build your authority is by linking back to yourself, and tying your online presence together.

Google doesn’t intrinsically know that the “She Knows SEO” on Youtube is the same as SheKnowsSEO.co. It’s my job to tell it that.

How do we do that?

First, we need to link from our social media profiles to our website. Many platforms will make you verify your connection or “claim” your website.

But it also works when you just add a link to your bio, like getting a link from your ChatGPT builder profile or using the “link in bio” section of Instagram.

Second, we need to claim our social media profiles on our website. You do this with “SameAs schema”.

It’s a bit different for every website platform and theme, but here’s the process with Rank Math:

1. Go to your “Author” profile in the backend of WordPress (“Users” -> “All Users” -> Click on your profile
2. Add links to your relevant profiles on other sites and on social media, like this:

Do You Need Backlinks for Authority with AI Search?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: You need backlinks for the Bing rankings that help power the LLM. But for the LLM itself, no, you need branded mentions, but they don’t actually have to link to your website.

If the BBC mentions you in an article, but didn’t give you a backlink, that’s just as valuable as a backlink in AI Search.

LLMs (the models that run popular AI like ChatGPT Search) are smart af. They can figure out that that mention of “She Knows SEO” without a link to the site, is the same as someone linking to the site.

No more need to panic over a great brand citing you but leaving out the link!

That being said, a backlink is still helpful. It just isn’t a requirement for the algorithm to know that reference to you exists.

Outdated Link Building Strategies to Avoid

Buying Links

To paraphrase Sabrina Carpenter: please, please, please don’t buy backlinks on Fiverr or Upwork.

Buying links is a bad idea. I literally burnt down my old travel blog by buying backlinks from DA 50-70 sites (I did it on purpose, cause I didn’t want to work on it anymore and I was having a bit of a mental health crisis. I don’t regret it and it did prove these 500 word, no traffic, high DA sites are crap).

You can definitely hire someone to do proper outreach for you, but you should always evaluate the sites to ensure they’re actually legitimate.

A legit outreach specialist will call themselves that, and they’ll never guarantee a specific DA or amount of traffic. When they do get you links, they’ll share the DA and traffic of the site with you in their report.

Linkifi did this for all of the backlinks they got me (and while I bought 5, they got me 11! That’s a pretty amazing overdeliver when they were all DA 70+ news sites that were actually relevant to my business).

💡 What to Do: Disavow any links to your site that are spammy, from low quality sites, or were purchased from a link seller that didn’t do proper PR or outreach.

Directory Citations

This is an old school method of building links. People would just list themselves in every directory or round up ever, and then ride that DA to the authority bank.

… yeah, that doesn’t work anymore.

Directories are just for your audience to find you. Getting into your niche’s version of the Yellow Pages really isn’t the high authority win it once was.

It won’t hurt you, but it won’t help you either.

Collab Posts

Collab posts are like guest posts, but you only write one H2 section of the post.

I used to do a lot more of these, but even then I saw a way lower ROI than with guest posts. You’d have to write like 2k words of these to equate to the power of a 1k word guest post.

Collab posts often don’t get traffic. They’re hard to rank for, because the flow is all over the place and the actual author if the site doesn’t have experience with the things in the list. They’re usually kinda generic posts like “best places to visit in Europe”, that are already very competitive. And they’re usually quite thin content that users don’t love.

It can hurt you to do collab posts, if the site has a high spam score or if it doesn’t get much traffic.

A lot of links from collab posts can also potentially look like spammy backlink building if you’re not checking that the site gets traffic.

I’d say 60% of these opportunities shouldn’t hurt you, but evaluate before you agree to them!

💡 What to Do: If you did any collab posts, check the sites’ spam scores and traffic. If they are basically a spammy, dead site, it might be worth it to ask for your part to be removed from the post.

Link Swaps

Link swaps have always been “bad” in Google’s eyes. Basically, they’re when Site A links from Post A to Site B’s Post A. Then Site B links from Post B on their site to Post B on Site A.

It’s like your friend saying “hey, you should check out Nina’s article on thing A!” and you saying, “you should check out Theo’s article on thing B!”

They’ll happen naturally, especially if your regularly recommend something or someone.

It can hurt you if:

• They’re 100% of your backlinks
• You do it constantly – like over 4 times a month, intentionally
• You’re linking to/from sites that have a high DA but no traffic
• The sites you’re linking to/from have 0 relevance to your site or your audience
• You like from Post A on your site to Post A on their site, and they link from Post A on their site to Post A on your site (this is called “reciprocal linking”)
• Their site has a high spam score

Basically, if it happens naturally or happens once in a while, it’s fine! But when you’re doing a lot of it, it won’t help you.

Also, when I tested this even in pre-AI Mode times, it didn’t work nearly as well as guest posting. That’s largely because a random link is not going to drive that much traffic to your website.

I also suspect it’s because a lot of people did a lot of this type of linking, so even if you only did it once or twice, the people you were linking to may have done it heaps and then you got penalized for being associated with them.

💡 What to Do: If you did this in the past, it shouldn’t be a major issue unless the sites now have a crazy high spam score or no traffic. Then, I’d remove them and ask them to remove yours, too.

Comment Link Backs

These haven’t been a thing since like 2012.

You used to be able to drop your link in a comment on someone else’s site – either as the comment or by linking your name and email to your website – and get a backlink to your site that would pass authority.

Not anymore!

Comment links have been no follow basically the entire time I’ve been blogging (I started after 2012, to be clear).

People still do it though. It’s one of the reasons I turn off comments on my sites, cause it just gets spammy.

How to Evaluate a Backlink

Before you reach out to a site or accept a request to write for a website, check the following:

*These are specifically for backlinks from websites. You can kind of use them to evaluate a podcast or Youtube channel, but usually there’s no downside to guesting there from a backlink perspective.

Topical Relevance

Does their audience match your ideal audience?

It’s ok if it’s a parenting blog, but you’re a solo female travel blogger. You don’t need 100% of their audience to fit.

But realistically, would some of their audience be a good fit to read multiple articles on your website or to purchase something from you?

If not, move on!

Traffic

Does their website get traffic?

You can check this using a free tool like SimilarWeb (because SEMrush and Keysearch will only show their SEO traffic).

Set a minimum number you look for.

At this point, for She Knows SEO it would likely be 30k pageviews per month. But someone just starting out or in an authority building mode would likely have a lower threshold.

Spam

Check their spam score to ensure it’s not over 2% on Moz.

And if it is, check their backlinks to see if they have an unusually high number of toxic backlinks (i.e. those DA 70 sites with no traffic, or a lot of p*rn or casino links).

We don’t want to be affiliated with a spammy site. It can make us seem spammy by association.

Note: these scores are kinda arbitrary and can easily get messed up. If your site has a high spam score, it can be worth disavowing links to lower it if you’re trying to get people to guest post on your site. Otherwise, don’t worry about it and focus on getting high quality backlinks to even it out.

Placement on Page

Cyrus Shepard did an in depth study of internal links to see what placement on the page had the biggest impact.

He found that links higher up on the page pass more authority than links lower on the page.

It’s probably because most readers don’t make it to the bottom of an article.

So aim for opportunities to have your link at the top of the post.

If it’s below heaps of other links (like in a collab post), it’s likely to pass less authority to your site.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that gets hyperlinked. Try to get relevant anchor text so the audience expects what they’re going to get when they click on the link.

It shouldn’t be clickbait or be misleading. It just needs to naturally relate to what you’re linking to.

For example, if I wanted to link to this post from another on my site, I wouldn’t say “Read this post about link building” or “internal linking passes authority”.

The first isn’t natural. The second isn’t about link building.

Here’s an example of good anchor text – with the linked section inside the “[]”:

“I stopped [using outdated link building methods] to grow my authority and my rankings shot up!”

No Follow vs. Do Follow

No follow and do follow are link parameters that basically allow or don’t allow an algorithm’s bot to pass authority through a link.

No follow links are like a stop sign to bots. Don’t pass any authority via this link!

Do follow links are a green light that lets the bots drive right on through, passing “link juice” / authority.

Ideally, we want do follow links.

But in the age of AI Mode with LLMs are able to see the link and process it’s existence without the bots needing to “drive” along the link path, it’s not as big of a deal.

Link Building is Only 1 Part of Building Authority

Yes, we need to build links to grow our online authority and to rank #1 on Google or ChatGPT Search.

But we don’t need to make it our full time job.

Link building isn’t the only way that we grow our authority, and if we put all of our time and effort into it, we’ll never get the more important part: building our topical authority.

Branded mentions and backlinks show that people trust us, but algorithms know that we can do PR and kinda skew this.

They need more proof that we actually know what the heck we’re talking about and that we’re helping people.

To prove that, we need topical authority. That comes from writing on a topic from multiple angles, taking our audience on a journey from point A to point Z, and connecting our content with internal links so the algorithms understand that all of our content is interrelated.

Read More About Backlinks

• SEO Outreach: What It Is and Why It’s Vital for Bloggers
• Accepting Guest Posts on Your Blog: The Ultimate Guide
• 100+ Best Travel Blogs that Accept Guest Posts
• Is Link Building Important for SEO?

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