Relevance Beats Quantity
Backlink strategies still matter for Google rankings, but the quality and relevance of a link can matter far more than raw volume. SEO consultant Matt Kenyon cites a Backlinko study finding that Google's number-one result has, on average, 3.8 times more backlinks than results in positions two through ten. His broader point is that link building has changed: earning relevant links from credible pages is more useful than chasing large numbers of low-value backlinks.
Kenyan traces an evolution across three eras. Under the old PageRank algorithm, it was all about quantity: SEOs slammed domains with as many links as they could acquire, quality be damned. As the algorithm evolved, authority took over, a link from Forbes or the New York Times dwarfed one from a personal blog. Today, he argues, the decisive factor is relevancy. Google search advocate John Mueller made it clear in a 2021 hangout that one good link from a relevant website can be more impactful than millions of low-quality links.
The industry appears to have internalized this shift. Kenyan cites a 2024 editorial link survey in which 84.6% of respondents identified link relevance as the primary metric for assessing backlink quality. The practical consequence: high-quality relevant links can now outperform even high-authority but irrelevant ones.
Fourteen Tactics, Condensed
- Ultimate guides.Find high-performing recent content in your niche with Ahrefs Content Explorer, then build something more comprehensive and expert-crafted.
- Micro tools.Small free calculators and utilities can attract tens of thousands of backlinks, and AI coding tools lower the barrier to building them.
- Statistics and surveys.Analyze which specific statistics people link to most, then reframe them with new angles or original data.
- Resource roundups.Either build a better roundup and poach its linkers, or pitch your product into existing roundups, pre-written in the host's style, with images included.
- Expert quotes.Services like Help a B2B Writer supply quotes that boost credibility and can seed expert collaborations; experts can register as sources to earn links back.
Build Things People Would Be 'Insane Not to Link To'
Kenyan's favorite tactic is content-driven link building, creating 'linkable assets' so compelling that people in your audience, as he puts it, would be insane not to link to them. It's the most natural and safest method, and also the most challenging, which he sees as a competitive advantage over those unwilling to do the work. The proof points are striking: a Python web-scraping tutorial by the software company ScrapingBee single-handedly generated 238 backlinks, and an article on the four stages of sleep by Aura earned 108.
Even more powerful than guides are micro tools, small, free, ungated browser-based utilities that help users complete a task. A living-wage calculator on MIT's website has generated 56, 500 backlinks; a salary paycheck calculator has earned ADP 3, 700 links to that page alone. Kenyan is 'super bullish' on the strategy, especially as AI-assisted coding lets people build such tools with zero programming knowledge.
Data-driven content rounds out this cluster. Statistics pages perform best when they add engaging visuals or take fresh angles on existing data sets, an online learning statistics post from Devlin Peck pulled in 1, 600 backlinks. But Kenyan offers a caveat about production: the best linkable assets are not spun up by AI tools; they're crafted by experts with care, and he believes readers can tell the difference.
Borrowing Links: Competitors, Broken Pages, and Journalists
The first thing Kenyan does for any new client is competitor link analysis: find the sites linking to your organic competitors but not to you, then work out how to win those links too. Using a tool like Ahrefs' link intersect, he shows how one gardening site discovered that The Spruce Eats linked to three of its competitors but not to it, turning an invisible gap into a concrete outreach target. Digging deeper, he found a forum thread earning a competitor links, and suggested converting that thread into a superior official page, then asking the linker to switch.
Broken and outdated links extend the same logic. In one worked example, a broken 'sustainable living' page still attracted 36 linking sites; rebuilding that page and asking those webmasters to link to the replacement is the pitch. The Wayback Machine can reveal what made the dead page link-worthy in the first place. Kenyan's guidance on outreach is consistent: demonstrate that the swap benefits the linker's audience, not just your own link count.
Digital PR scales this up by pairing data with journalism. Journalists love linking to statistics, Kenyan notes, so the 'secret sauce' is creating your own data (via surveys of your audience or paid panels through tools like SurveyMonkey) or combining freely available government and Kaggle data sets in ways that catch a reporter's eye. Even no-follow links from big directories like Crunchbase and G2 are worth pursuing, he adds, because many SEOs believe they pass substantial authority.
Advanced Moves: Redirects, Communities, and Reinvented Guest Posts
Among the riskier strategies is acquiring aged or relevant domains and 301-redirecting them to your site (effectively buying a business and merging its 'customers, ' in Kenyan's analogy, by funneling its backlinks to yours. The caution is severe: redirecting a toxic, spammy domain can do far more harm than good and trigger a Google manual penalty. He advises vetting domains with tools like Ahrefs or Majestic and the Wayback Machine, and) per a tip from SEO Twitter, dripping in page-level redirects one at a time rather than redirecting the whole domain at once, which can cause algorithmic volatility.
Community-driven tactics have also grown more valuable. Google has massively boosted community sites, especially Reddit, Kenyan points out that for the hyper-competitive query 'how to do keyword research, ' a lowly Reddit thread ranks number two. His 'Reddit hacking' is nothing shady: genuine, value-adding engagement in relevant subreddits, aided by tools like Gummy Search, which aggregates subreddits and uses AI to surface hot discussions worth joining or writing about.
Guest posting, meanwhile, needs reinvention. Searching 'topic + write for me' surfaces sites flooded with spammy submissions, and Kenyan doesn't think that traditional route is viable anymore. His alternative: find a non-competing site serving your audience, use a content-gap analysis to show its competitors rank for keywords it doesn't, and offer to write those pieces for free in exchange for a link. In one demonstration, he found the keyword 'fanfix' with zero keyword difficulty and 118, 000 monthly searches, a pitch he considers nearly impossible for a site to refuse.
What to Avoid, and Why You Can't Fully Outsource This
Kenyan's warnings are as concrete as his tactics. Link farms and sketchy paid link schemes top his avoid-at-all-costs list. Over-optimized anchor text (stuffing links with keywords instead of letting them read naturally, which he calls anchor text diversity) is 'a huge red flag for Google' that can earn a manual penalty.
His sharpest critique targets done-for-you link building agencies. Quality backlinks are about relationships with real people, he argues, and he has heard repeated horror stories, most memorably an acquaintance whose agency delivered junky, toxic links; when the client asked for their removal, the activity itself looked suspicious to Google and triggered a manual penalty, right before a six-figure site sale. Kenyan outsources only components like outreach or content development, and never guarantees links, since what other websites do is the one thing in SEO entirely outside your control.