How The PROS Are Building Backlinks In 2024 (Link Building Statistics)

- Speaker A is giving a talk about some new link building statistics for 2024. He introduces himself and introduces the tools people use and the types of backlinks people are building. - Speaker A tells the audience about the statistics from a LinkedIn poll. The responders tend to be white-hat and working for larger companies. 70% of people do not outsource link building. - Speaker A and Speaker B talk about the impact of link building on rankings and traffic. Speaker B thinks it takes anywhere between two weeks to three months to see results from link building. - Speaker A asks people why they're not ranking and what link building tactics they consider to be the most effective. Speaker A is digital PR. Speaker B is outreach based link building. - Speaker A tells the others guest posting and each edits are their biggest sellers. He thinks digital PR is not effective for a lot of people because the links are not relevant to their niche. However, regular guest posting or niche edits are still highly effective. - The average cost of acquiring one high quality link is estimated to be about $200 for link. The most reliable way to measure the quality of a backlink is doctor or domain rating.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, today we are going to be talking about some new link building statistics for 2024. As you might know, I'm one of the co founders over here at Solinksolot Co. A seven figure link building agency. We've got thousands of clients. We've built thousands and thousands and thousands of backlinks over the past six years or so. So maybe this qualifies me to give some commentary on this subject. I'll let you be the decider of that. And we're going to cover a lot of stuff here. What tools people are using, what types of backlinks people are building, how effective they think links are. So definitely watch until the end because there's some really interesting stuff in here. All right, let's get into it. Some christyjs who might know me from my link building agency of Wrestlingsalot Co. Or our other Facebook group or YouTube channel, or maybe you've seen me around on some SEO podcasts or at some SEO conferences, but you can go to my website for more info on me. So these statistics are a post that I saw over on LinkedIn by the folks over at editorial link. You can go ahead and check it out over there if you'd like. But one quick disclaimer before we get into things here, as this was essentially a LinkedIn poll, there are a few things we should keep in mind. Number one is that a lot of the responders tend to be a little bit more on the white hat side of things. Also, they tend to be working for or working with kind of larger companies. Because they're working with larger companies, they tend to have larger websites with larger domain authority already. So definitely keep that in mind because that can skew things quite a bit. And I'll be sure to bring that up. As we're talking about things that we see here. In the results here, we can see what kind of positions the responders have. They are head of SEO, SEO consultant, CEO, marketing manager, CMO, link building specialist and other. So first stat, do you outsource link building? It looks like about 70% of people here do not outsource link building. They do link building in house. So again, remember here we're talking about larger companies or larger agencies. So of course, a lot of these people are going to handle link building themselves rather than paying someone else to do it for them. So just remember that your situation might be drastically different from this, right? Because if you don't have the correct tools, which can cost thousands and thousands of dollars per month, if you don't know how to build quality links. If you don't even really know what a quality link is, then of course outsourcing is 100% going to be the better option for you. But large companies, large agencies tend to do things themselves for the most part. But I would just go ahead and say that, you know, just my time in the SEO industry, I know quite a lot of people who are very well known SEOs who outsource all of their link building, and even I outsource my link building from time to time depending on the project. And I have my own link building agency. So it can really just be highly dependent on your situation, the type of links you're trying to build and all that good stuff. Next up, how long does it typically take you to see the impact of link building on rankings and traffic? It looks like almost no one said less than one week. Most people are saying two to four weeks or about six weeks, about a month and a half or so, and then 15% of people are saying no correlation. I'm not really sure what is meant by this, but in a lot of cases, you know, link building, you can look at it as rolling like a snowball down a hill, right. Depending on what your competitors are and what kind of keywords you're trying to rank for, it could take a really long time to see the results that you're looking for. Because if everyone has a much higher domain rating than you, a much higher backlink authority, that could really take a long time. You might not really see results from building links because you're just getting part of the way there before you're starting to be able to outrank them. Right. But I would say for the most part, I pretty much agree here. You know, I would say anywhere between two weeks to three months to see results from link building. In most cases, assuming you've done like everything else correctly, right over here on my channel in this video right here, why you're not ranking. I talk about a lot of the things that might be the reason why you're not ranking. And if you're not doing a lot of these things, or if you have all of these other problems and you're starting to build backlinks, hoping that's going to fix your problem, it might just not have the effects that you're looking for at all. Right, so you really have to be doing everything else correctly to see these results, but more or less agree on this one. Next up, what link building tactic do you consider to be the most effective? You can see almost 70% of people are saying digital PR is the most effective. They've got a bunch of other different tactics listed down here at the bottom. Guest posting, link exchanges, linkable assets, blogger outreach, broken link building, skyscraper technique, Harold Link building, niche edits or link insertions, UGC links, expired domains and other UGC links, of course, would be something like blog comments or forum comments. I would say this is somewhat deceiving, though, because if you add up some of these other things, like I'm going to show you in a second, then there's going to be another winner here. So if we take guest posting, blogger Outreach, which is essentially guest posting as well, skyscraper technique, which is also pretty much the standard kind of outreach process, and link insertions, that comes out to about 83%. And I would group all of these together into one thing, which would essentially just be called outreach. Outreach based link building. You're sending a bunch of emails to people right over here at our link building agency. Our guest posting and niche editors are by far our biggest sellers. We do do digital PR as well, but guest posting and each edits are, yeah, by far the biggest. Because you have to remember digital PR has a pretty high price tag on it, usually costs about $5,000 per campaign or so. And the sites that you're getting these links from are not exactly the most relevant to your niche. Right. They tend to be kind of these more general websites that post kind of news topics. So for example, like Huffington Post, right, versus the links you can get from guest posting or niche edits could be something much more tailored to your niche. So you have a plumbing website, you get links from websites that are all about, you know, home improvement or something like that. So I'm definitely not saying that digital PR is not effective because you can get some really good links here that are definitely going to help move the needle for you. However, I would say for a lot of people, just doing regular guest posting or niche edits or outreach, whatever you want to call it, doing these kind of links, especially in the beginning when you might not have the big budget for digital PR, these are still highly effective to get you up to a kind of a mid range authority, let's say Doctor 40, Doctor 50 or so. And then it's after I reached that point when I would really start investing in digital PR a lot more to push you up to a much higher authority level. Link exchanges can be good, but I would say definitely do them in moderation. Try to limit the amount of reciprocal link exchanges you're doing and definitely make sure you're doing them with good websites. Remember, a lot of people that are offering link exchanges, they kind of give you these sites that aren't really good at all to do link exchanges on. So yeah, definitely be a little careful with that one broken link building. Honestly, I don't really do this at all anymore. There's just too many people scraping for it and doing it. Haro I would still say is definitely a good thing to do. I definitely do UGC links as well, except it's just what I consider part of like foundational link building, not really the backbone of what you're building. Expired domains. I guess people doing 301 redirects, that's definitely a little hack you can do as well. Next up, what is the average cost of acquiring one high quality link? And you can see people's answers here are all over the place. So anywhere from one hundred dollars to one thousand dollars per link. You got to remember that most of the people said they really like digital PR. So I think this is kind of inflating the numbers here a bit. And you can see most of the people are saying between dollar 400 and dollar 600 per link or even higher than that. So this is going to depend a lot on what exactly you consider a high quality link and the type of link building that you're doing. But if we're talking links with like higher domain rating that are actually getting some traffic, I'd say the bare minimum you'd be looking at would probably be about $200 for link. But also keep in mind, like just because a link isn't high authority does not mean that it's not good. You can still get lower authority links that are still highly relevant and from quality websites. They just don't have that high backlink authority. Right? So they might not be as powerful, but it can still be a quality link. But I don't think that's what they're really talking about here. Next up, which metric do you consider to be the most reliable for determining domain authority? You see, almost everyone here is saying doctor is the best way to measure this. Definitely going to have to agree on this one. Ahrefs doctor definitely seems to best measure. I just feel like they have the best backlink data. However, like I showed on this video on my channel, it's actually really easy to go over to fiverr and to spoof your doctor to make it higher than it actually is for just a couple bucks. I'm not saying to go to do this, it's just something that a lot of websites are doing, a lot of guest post farms are doing to help sell backlinks. While it is a good measure of things, I would always come over into Ahrefs and actually click and look at their domain rating over time. This purple line right here. And just make sure there's no like huge spikes that are happening really fast because when you see that there's a good chance that they are using doctor boosting services to get that higher doctor, it could also come from something like a 301 redirect, which should be a much better way to get a higher doctor that actually benefit you. So yeah, definitely looking at things a little bit more. Next up, what metrics do you use to measure the quality of a backlink? 70% of people are saying site traffic. About 70% are also saying doctor or domain rating. 85% of people are saying relevance. And I would say these are all good starting points, but you're definitely have to look into things a little bit more fully than that. So for site traffic, for example, if you came over to see their site traffic, but then you went into their organic keywords and the keywords they were getting their site traffic from weren't really related to your niche at all or were just kind of some really low competition keywords that anybody can rank for with high search volumes, then yeah, it's not really quality traffic, is it? It's a common guest post farm kind of scam technique. Doctor already went over how you have to be really careful with that, make sure they're not trying to spoof it in some way. Relevance. It's always a good way to measure the quality of your backlinks. However, keep in mind that relevance can come in a bunch of different forms. Right. So our website over here at serlinkslot Co. Obviously we are a backlink building agency. We're going to be highly relevant for SEO and backlink type stuff. So does that mean that we only want backlinks from websites that are about SEO? No, we get backlinks from business blogs, tech blogs, digital marketing blogs. There's a bunch of different stuff that can be seen as relevant. So you have domain level relevance, you have article level relevance, you have paragraph level relevance and then you even have sentence level relevance. I would say in most cases I'm kind of looking in between domain level relevance as well as article level relevance. Next up, some of these other things we have here. A lot of people are looking at referral traffic, which is honestly not something I look at when I'm link building at all. You can look at it and it can be pretty cool to have referral traffic. However, it's not necessary for increasing your domain rating and getting a ranking boost. Next up, anchor text. I'm not saying anchor text isn't important, but yeah, you know, just because your link has a branded anchor text or miscellaneous anchor text or something that you see as kind of low value and not exact match anchor something definitely does not mean that's not a quality link. I have to completely disagree with this one right here. Inbound outbound link ratio. I know a lot of people are looking at this recently, but it's not something I really look at too much. The overall link profile of the donor site. So they're actually coming in and looking at all the backlinks that the website has and saying, okay, it looks pretty legit and I would say that's a pretty good thing to do just to make sure that the backlink profile isn't full of a bunch of irrelevant spam and they're kind of just like spoofing their doctor. Right. One thing that I don't see mentioned here is keywords, which is something I actually like to look at. I like to come over to the website, look at the organic keywords that the website is ranking for just to make sure that they're somewhat relevant to what I'm trying to rank for. So if I come and I see the website has a decent doctor, it hasn't been manipulated. With a doctor boosting gig, hopefully they get most of the traffic from the US or whatever english speaking country. If you're doing English, SEO got some decent traffic and they haven't taken any big algorithm hits or manual penalties. And then once you've checked all that, come in and looking at keywords can be a good way just to make sure that they're actually ranking for stuff that's legitimate and not just, yeah, trying to spoof their traffic numbers. Next up, what percentage of your SEO budget is currently dedicated to link building? Again, with this one we can see people are really all over the place. I would say for most projects I'm probably between 15% and 50%. So a combination of this teal and blue ones right here. But it looks like most people here are spending a pretty decent amount on link building. Right? Like I go over in this video right here, I still believe backlinks are by far the biggest ranking factor on Google if you're doing everything else correctly. Right? I'm not saying content's not important, so don't get angry in the comments, guys, but once you're doing everything else correctly, link building becomes the decider. So definitely watch that video for more info on that while you're over here on my channel. Go ahead and give the video a like and give my channel a sub if you're enjoying the content. Yeah, anyways, backlinks are pretty much one of the major parts of SEO, right? You have your content, your on page SEO, all that stuff all just grouped together and then you have your off page SEO, your backlinks. Other than that, you have stuff like your user engagement metrics. But I can just group that into content because if you're doing your content correctly, you're going to have good user engagement metrics. And then you could also have stuff like your off page brand signals, which I guess you could incorporate into off page SEO. It's not really link building, but yeah, having these kind of off page brand signals seems to have some kind of effect as well. So anyways, it makes a lot of sense that a lot of people are spending a lot of their budget on link building. Next up, we'll get into some tools. Link building and outreach tools. They're saying that the most accurate email finder is Hunter IO or they don't use any at all. You got some other options here, and I pretty much agree with that. I like Hunter IO. It's a pretty good tool. You can come over to my website, click the recommended tools page to see a long list of all the different tools that I'm using for SEO. Next up, best link building outreach tool it looks like most people either don't use any tool at all or they're using Buzzstream or pitchbox. These are kind of the two big ones that you see people talk about most of the time. If you have a large agency and you're really building backlinks at scale, then in a lot of cases you're really going to want one of these big tools because it just makes your life so much easier. But they do have a pretty large price tag. But like 51% of people are saying here, you definitely do not need a tool to help you with your outreach. You can do it all manually. So really, until you can get a larger budget to really justify getting one of these big tools, you'll be just fine without any kind of tool at all. Next up, best all in one SEO of tool. We can see ahrefs right here. In the blue is number one and then Semrush is number two. Ahrefs is definitely my favorite here. However, I know a lot of people like Semrush, or maybe they just really hate ahrefs. Anyways, I'm sticking with ahrefs for now, but I would say Semrush is definitely a good number two. Next up, on a scale of one to ten, how would you assess the impact of links? You can see over here on the left hand side, these people that are saying that links don't have much of an impact really make up a pretty low percentage of the vote here. And then over here on the right hand side, people are saying anywhere between six and ten. As far as the technical much higher percentage of the vote, which is pretty much in line with my video here saying that backlinks are pretty much one of the strongest ranking factors on Google. Actually, I think they are the strongest by far. Next up, do you use Google Disavow tools? Currently disavow is of course when you tell Google, hey, there's some bad links that we got, go ahead and please ignore these links because we don't want them affecting our website. Looks like about 70% of people are saying they do not use disavowals and about 30% are saying they do. I definitely fall into the group of 70% saying I do not disavow mainly. However, there are a few situations when I might want to actually consider a disavow. If I come in and I'm looking at a website or I'm starting to work on a website and I see that a lot of their backlinks are just completely irrelevant. Spam just trash their anchor text has way too many exact match anchors and stuff like that. Or maybe they've been hit with a bunch of really, really nasty spam like those k HTML backlinks. I wrote an article on those links over here and pretty much saying I would go ahead and just disavow them because there's no way that they're actually helping you at all. But in a lot of cases, you'll see a lot of these spam links actually end up helping you rather than hurting you. So I would only disavow even if they're spam links, I'd only disavow them in really a small number of cases anyway. I almost never disavow in the times that I do. It's for something very specific, and I'd really recommend that most people do not disavow because most people, when they disavow, they actually end up disavowing stuff that was actually helping them rather than hurting them. So I'd be pretty careful with this stuff. Next up, do you think your competitors buy links? About 92% of people are saying yes and 8% no. So yes, everyone's saying that. I think my competitors are buying a ton of backlinks. Of course, I can't show you our clients over here at Sirlinksalot Co. But if you could see some of the big names that we're building links for, I think you would understand that pretty much everyone is buying backlinks right now. Whether that's a big company, a small company, everyone's doing link building because they understand how powerful it is. How many links you need to buy is going to be highly dependent on your competitors and your niche. But if you have a doctor of ten or 20 or something and all of your competitors have a doctor of 50 or 60, you're going to have a very hard time outranking them and it's pretty much just never going to happen. Right, next up, do you consider link building to be the most challenging part of SEO? It looks like people are pretty split on this. I know a lot of people hate link building, which is why we can have a successful agency over here, right, because people just hate doing it. However, having built links for a while, I would say. I would definitely say that link building is not the hardest part of SEO. It's maybe annoying, but it's not the hardest. I feel like it's actually much harder to create good content at scale. There are just so many more things you have to consider when you're building out good content, managing your writers, targeting keywords correctly, having unique information, adding to information gain, juggling, using AI and human written stuff. But link building on the other hand, I feel like hasn't really changed much at all in the past decade or so. Of course, people are probably using pbns less, but all the kind of outreach based link building, digital pr stuff like Haro, all this stuff hasn't really changed. You know, quality links are quality links and it's not really changing. And it pretty much all comes down to either creating good linkable assets or good digital pr campaigns, or, you know, knowing how to send a quality outreach email and actually get people to respond to you. But it's really not super difficult stuff, just time intensive and it is a numbers game in a lot of situations, right? So people really don't like the process. Main source to use for link building looks like most people are using email. Of course, I will have to 100% agree here. Email is the way that you end up landing backlinks. There are other ways that you can get backlinks but good old fashioned emails is definitely the best way. Which SEO tool provides comprehensive backlink data? And you see ahrefs is number one here, which I was just talking about earlier. 100% agree there. Next up, do you make an effort to get no follow links? It looks like people are about 50 50 on this. I will say that nofollow links can still be highly effective and still push your rankings, even though a lot of people think that they don't. But if it's a quality nofollow link, it'd still be really good. Then you have a lot of people who say, well, I want to create a natural backlink profile, so I need to try to build some more nofollow links because I have too many dofollow links. This is actually something I don't do at all. You know, I will build some nofollow links on purpose, but that's when I'm doing my foundational link building and I'm not building those links because they're nofollow, I'm building them because they're good foundational backlinks. So I'm not really building them for that purpose specifically. But I also would never say no to a good nofollow backlink. Right. I just don't necessarily try to get them on purpose. Do you use AI in your link building efforts? And I'm a little bit surprised on this one because about, because people are about 50 50 on this. I made this video on my channel, link building with AI, which talks about a bunch of different ways you can be using AI to actually build quality links and not just spam. Right? So whether that's helping with your outreach emails, to have them specifically tailored to the person you're reaching out to, helping brainstorm guest post ideas, helping write your content for guest posts that should then be edited by humans. Of course, rewriting your email outreach templates, finding where the best place on a page is to do a link insertion for your site. There are a ton of ways that you can be using AI to really enhance your link building and speed things up. So yeah, kind of surprised that people aren't using it as much. I think a lot of people might just associate AI with low quality work, but yeah, you can really just be using it for a bunch of these little small specific tasks that can really help just speed things up. Next up, how many high quality backlinks can one person build per month? And we'll see that people are pretty undecided here. Like we talked about before, what people considered a high quality backlink is going to change a lot. So I think people's answers here are highly dependent on that. If you're doing pretty standard email outreach, can be anywhere between 20 to 40 plus. But then if you're doing something like digital pr, maybe the campaign doesn't land as well. Or maybe you're doing kind of this more just content marketing approach, then things might go a lot slower. Right? Next up, is it possible to rank high on Google solely through quality content without relying on backlinks? And about 71% of people say that yes, you can rank with only content and don't have to rely on backlinks. And I don't understand how they can give this answer. While we saw in the other poll that they said that backlinks are super effective at increasing your rankings, I think this really boils down to the fact that they're saying that they can create good quality content and that content, if it's good enough, will eventually get links to itself. Or maybe it's because we're over here on LinkedIn and these people are working for large brands, large companies, and their websites already have really high doctor, so they don't really need to do a ton of link building. But whether you're building links yourself or you're writing good content and then that content attracts links, you're going to need domain authority to compete on almost every SeRp out there. Like I talked about in this video, backlink authority is just getting more and more important over time. And it looks like Google might actually be starting to just now tone it down a little bit. But on most serps, you'll just see high authority just winning all the time. So anyway, if you have a high authority site, maybe you don't need to do a bunch of link building, just depending on what your competitors have. Or you can create good content and play the sit and wait game, but eventually you're going to need those backlinks to come in one way or another. Whether you're buying them, whether they're building them yourself for free, whether you're doing digital pr, whether you're doing content marketing, you're going to need that backlink authority. If this makes you angry, go ahead and drop an example of a website in the comments that is ranking for medium to high difficulty keywords with a very low doctor. So that's about it. But yeah, just remember that these results are a little bit skewed just because of who's answering these questions. Kind of a LinkedIn, more white hat, more corporate kind of crowded. So their answer might be different than yours, right? What they need to do is a lot different than what you need to do depending on where your website is, what your current authority level is, what your competition looks like, all that stuff. Let's do a real quick recap. A lot of even the really big people are outsourcing, and there would be a much higher percentage of people saying they're outsourcing if this was people that weren't working for these big brands, right? Of course. Remember that links do take time to have an effect. You're not going to see immediate results, and it could end up being a really long time, even much longer than six weeks, depending on what exactly you're trying to do and what your keywords are, what your competition is. Digital PR and outreach based link building tend to be the favorites. I would go ahead and agree with that. Those are the things that are going to move the needle the most. Still really like Haro though as well. And the Atlink exchanges can be pretty decent. But definitely don't sleep on your foundational link building either. It's not really something included here. Backlinks can cost a lot of money. I would expect dollar 200 plus for a quality backlink, right? We're talking decent traffic, good metrics. It's relevant. It's not just a guest post farm. But yeah, don't be surprised you're paying $400 to $500 for a link as well for it's a nice high quality backlink, maybe even higher if you're doing digital pr. Ahrefs still seems to be the king of backlink data, and determining backlink authority of a website traffic doctor and relevance tend to be the big things people look at. However, I would also add in, you should look at keywords and some other stuff just to make sure they're not doing these sneaky guest post farm kind of tactics. People are spending sizable percentages of their budget on link building. Of course, tools like Hunter can speed up your email finding process. You don't necessarily need an outreach tool like Buzzstream or pitchbox, but those can help out a ton, especially if you're doing link building on a big scale. Again, Ahrefs number one for SEO tool people saying that backlinks effectiveness is anywhere between a six and a ten on the scale. Most people are not disavowing. Again, be very, very careful with disavows. Also, pretty much everyone is buying backlinks. This is just a fact of life. If you're doing business on the Internet and you want to get organic search traffic from Google. You have to get accustomed to this fact and you're going to have to figure out a way to get backlinks, whether that's from buying them yourself, building them yourself, or doing some type of content marketing. You're going to need to get your backlink authority up. Of course, a lot of people hate link building. I do too, even though we've got a link building agency. So yeah, I understand why a lot of people don't want to do it. But I would definitely say content at scale, really good content is a lot harder to do. Email based outreach is definitely how people are mostly landing backlinks ahrefs with the best data. Again, some people are going out of their way to build only no follow back links or some no follow backlinks. However, it's not something I do myself. Now. I would say not enough people are using AI. You guys need to get on the train here. There's definitely some stuff that AI can do that can help just speed things up. And we're not talking about sending spam, we're not talking about doing low quality work. We're not talking about just doing spam. AI generated guest posts definitely watch out other video on my channel for more info on that. This is probably the biggest one I'm going to have to disagree with. Definitely need to build your backlink authority. And I think this poll is skewed a lot just by the type of people that are responding to it over here on LinkedIn. So that's pretty much it. Guys, what do you think? Let me know down in the comments if you liked the video. Go ahead and give it a like and give my channel a sub and I will see you next time. Bye.