Paid links are a short-term loan with a long-term interest rate called 'manual action.' These seven tactics earn links the hard way and keep them through every algorithm update.

Buying links used to be profitable. It rarely is in 2026. Google’s link-spam detection systems have improved dramatically, and a single manual action wipes out years of work. The good news: earned links still move rankings, and the tactics that produce them are learnable. Here are seven we use at JettSEO.

1. Data studies

Journalists need citations. A 30-minute survey of 500 people in your industry, visualised as one chart, reliably earns 5-15 editorial links in the first month. The topic has to be statistically novel and relevant. Example: a survey of 500 DACH marketing managers on AI tool adoption earned our client 11 links in Handelsblatt, t3n, Internet World and others.

2. HARO / Qwoted / Featured

Three platforms that connect journalists with expert sources. Daily discipline — 30 minutes each morning answering 2-3 queries in your domain — produces 1-3 editorial links per week for serious practitioners. The trick is specificity: named examples, numbers, contrarian takes. Generic answers never get used.

3. The broken-link recovery playbook

Use Ahrefs or Semrush to find dead external links on sites in your niche. Email the editor: “You link to X which 404s. I have Y which covers the same ground.” Conversion rate is around 8-12 percent, much higher than cold outreach. Three hours of work per week reliably produces 2-4 links per month.

4. Unlinked brand mentions

Set up a brand-mention monitor (Ahrefs Alerts, Google Alerts, Mention). When someone cites your brand without linking, email politely. Conversion rate hovers around 35-45 percent — by far the highest of any tactic. The limitation is volume: only established brands see enough mentions to justify the system.

5. Guest posts on real publications

Not guest-post farms. Real publications in your niche that publish expert contributors. The test: does the publication have organic traffic, named editorial staff, a masthead? If yes, a contribution probably earns a real link. If the only requirement is “700 words with a dofollow link,” skip it.

6. Resource pages

Type site:edu “resources” “your topic“ into Google. You will find curated resource pages on university, government and industry sites. If your content is genuinely the best free resource on a topic, a short, specific email to the page maintainer has a 10-15 percent conversion rate. Good for evergreen topics, poor for trending ones.

7. Collaborative content

The expert roundup, co-authored with 10-20 named experts, is the single most reliable link-earning format. Each expert links to it because they are quoted. One client earned 34 editorial links from a single roundup post on “2025 B2B SEO predictions.” Works best once a year, not monthly.

What we do not recommend

  • PBNs. Private blog networks. Worked in 2015. Reliably get caught in 2026.
  • Comment spam. Zero ranking benefit since 2017.
  • Link exchanges. Schemes like “I link to you, you link to me” are trivially detected in Google’s reciprocal-link algorithm.
  • “Guest posts” on networks. If they will publish anything for EUR 80, the domain is compromised.

Quality metrics that matter

We judge earned links on four criteria:

  1. Topical relevance (is the linking page about your topic?)
  2. Domain organic traffic (DR is a proxy; traffic is the ground truth)
  3. Linking-pattern health of the domain (does it link naturally or compulsively?)
  4. Placement context (body copy beats author bio beats sidebar)

A “DR 75 link” with 500 monthly visitors, eleven outbound links per article and placement in the footer is worse than a DR 45 link with 50k visitors, three outbound links and a contextual body-copy mention. Metrics without context are noise.

Honest link building is slow. Six to twelve editorial links per month is a healthy cadence for a serious campaign. Anyone promising “50 links in 30 days” is selling risk you will not want to own.