How to Get Backlinks: Which Tactics Work at Your Size

A backlink is a link from another website to yours, which means getting one requires persuading somebody who does not work for you to point at your page. That is the entire difficulty, and it is why tactic lists are the wrong shape for the problem: they tell you what is possible, not what is possible for you. This guide is written for a growth or marketing lead at a seed to Series A B2B software company, sitting somewhere under Domain Rating 40, with nobody whose actual job is outreach. It gates every common tactic on three things you already know about your own company, maps the popular ones against Google's spam policies, and says which ones to leave alone until your next stage.

The short version

• When a tactic list fails, the list is rarely the problem. At least six of the eleven rows in the table below need an outreach owner, an original asset, or both, and a team that has neither cannot run them.
• Three inputs decide which tactic fits: your Domain Rating band, whether one named person owns outreach, and whether you can publish something original on a schedule.
• Below DR 20, almost everything that works is either a link you already earned and never claimed, or a link attached to your product rather than your blog.
• Google's spam policies name several of these shortcuts outright, including low-quality directory links, link exchanges, and optimized anchor text in guest posts.
• A link does nothing until Google crawls the page carrying it, so the gap between winning a link and seeing any effect is real and outside your control.

What actually counts as getting a backlink?

Any link from another domain to yours counts as a backlink, but only three kinds are worth planning around. An editorial link is one a writer chose to include because your page helped their reader. A placed link is one you arranged: a guest contribution, a resource-page listing, a partner directory. A qualified link carries rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc", which is Google's signal not to pass ranking credit, or link equity, along it.

Everything below concerns the first two, and it concerns acquisition rather than valuation: how a link gets made, by whom, and at what cost to you.

Why do most "how to get backlinks" lists not work?

Because none of the page-one results we read while preparing this guide gated its tactic list on the reader's authority, team size or publishing capacity. So a reader at DR 8 with one marketer and no proprietary data gets told to run digital PR campaigns and build linkable assets. That is advice which cannot be followed, and following it halfway produces the worst outcome of all: three months of effort and nothing to show.

The gap is not knowledge. Most teams can recite the tactics. The gap is that a tactic has a cost in hours, authority and raw material, and none of those three are visible in a numbered list.

Which three inputs decide the tactic you should run?

Your Domain Rating band, your outreach ownership, and your asset capacity. Each one closes off a different set of tactics, and together they usually leave two or three that are genuinely available to you right now.

Domain Rating band: Domain Rating is Ahrefs' proprietary metric for the strength of a site's backlink profile, scored 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale. It is Ahrefs' index of Ahrefs' own crawl, not a Google ranking input. It matters here for a human reason rather than an algorithmic one. The people you pitch can look at your site before they reply, and a thin profile gives them a reason not to. Treat under 20 as "strangers will not take a meeting", 20 to 40 as "you get replies from peers but not from publications", and over 40 as "a press angle can work".

Outreach ownership: either one named person has recurring hours for this every week, or nobody does. There is no middle setting. In our implementation work the second input, not the first, is what decides whether a link program produces anything, because every placed link requires someone to write the email, track the reply, and send the follow-up nobody enjoys sending.

Asset capacity: can you publish something original on a predictable schedule? Proprietary data from your own product, a genuinely free tool, documentation that solves a problem nobody else has written up. If the honest answer is "we publish blog posts about our category", you do not have asset capacity yet, and the tactics that depend on it will not work. Our guide to assets that earn links without outreach sets out what qualifies.

Which backlink tactics work at your stage?

Every row works at any Domain Rating unless its verdict says otherwise. Read across: check whether you have the owner and the asset the row requires, then read the verdict. A row you cannot staff is not a row you are behind on. It is a row for later.

Tactic	What it requires	Verdict
Unlinked mention reclamation	An hour a week and mentions that already exist	Run it now, first
Product-surface links	Real integrations, a marketplace listing, or public docs	Run it now if you have a product
Expert contribution and commentary	A named person willing to be quoted, and recurring hours	Run it now
Resource-page placement	An outreach owner and one page genuinely worth listing	Run it now, low yield
Guest contribution	Writing capacity, plus strict discipline on anchor text	Run it now, within the policy limits below
Industry directory listings	A handful of hours, once	A short list now, never a blast
Broken-link building	An outreach owner and a replacement page that actually matches	Next stage for most teams, at any Domain Rating
Integration and partner pages	A real commercial relationship, not a swap	Run it now if the partnership is real
Original data and linkable assets	Asset capacity and a distribution plan	Next stage, and rarely below DR 20, unless you already hold the data
Digital PR campaigns	An owner, an asset, and usually a budget	Next stage, and not below DR 20
Paid links, link exchanges, automated link services	Nothing, and that is the appeal	Never, see the policy section

What I've seen in practice: the two rows teams skip first are the two that actually pay below DR 20. Reclaiming the mentions you already earned and claiming the links attached to your product both feel too small to be a strategy, so they get postponed in favor of a campaign the team cannot staff. They are not small. In both, the case for the link is already made before you ask.

For B2B software specifically, the product-surface row deserves more attention than it usually gets, and our guide to which product surfaces actually earn links works through them individually.

How do you get your first ten backlinks with no authority and no budget?

In roughly this order, because each step is cheaper than the one after it.

1. Search your own brand name: find every article, roundup, forum thread and newsletter that mentions your company without linking to it. Those authors already decided you were worth naming. Asking for the link is a one-line email, not a pitch.
2. Claim your product's own surfaces: integration directories for every tool you connect to, marketplace listings, the partner pages of vendors you already pay. These are usually forms, not negotiations.
3. List on the directories that real buyers use: the software review sites and category directories in your space. Keep it to the ones a customer would actually visit, which is a much shorter list than it first appears.
4. Answer where your buyers ask: journalist request platforms, industry communities, podcasts that take founder guests. Many of these produce qualified or nofollowed links, which is fine. They produce readers, and readers produce editorial links later.
5. Write one thing only you can write: the number from inside your product, the process you run that nobody documents, the comparison you had to do before you built. One of these gives a writer something to cite. A category explainer gives them something they already have.

Ten links assembled this way will be unglamorous. They will also be real, relevant, and impossible for a competitor to replicate by copying your list.

How do you tell a good backlink from a bad one before you chase it?

At the prospecting stage you are not grading link quality. You are judging whether the pitch is worth an hour, which is a lower bar and a faster decision. Our guide to what makes a backlink valuable has the full four-filter evaluation; what follows is the triage that comes before it, designed to be run on thirty tabs in twenty minutes.

Three disqualifiers, each of which is visible without leaving the page:

• The page has no author and no editorial shape: no byline, no date, no argument, just a list. Nothing on a page like that was decided by a person you can persuade.
• The outbound links have no pattern: if a page links to a hundred unrelated destinations, your link would be the hundred and first, and it would mean as little as the rest.
• The neighbors are wrong: if the surrounding links are casino, crypto and essay-writing sites, the decision is already made and no metric rescues it.

Note what is absent from that list: a Domain Rating cutoff. DR is useful for reading your own position and for sorting a long prospect list into an order, not for approving or rejecting an individual page. Quality here is a property of the page in front of you, not a number attached to the domain behind it.

Which tactics does Google's spam policy rule out?

Several of the ones most often sold as easy. Google's spam policies, part of Search Essentials, define the category plainly: "Link spam is the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings." The examples that follow are specific, and they include practices that appear on most beginner tactic lists.

The policy also states the escape hatch: "Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes. It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value to the <a> tag." Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links sets out which value to use: sponsored for advertisements and paid placements, ugc for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts, and nofollow when the others do not apply.

Tactic	Where the policy puts it	What changes the answer
Paying for a link that passes credit	Named as link spam	Qualifying it with rel="sponsored"
Sending a product in exchange for a review link	Named as link spam	Qualifying the link, and not requiring one
Reciprocal link swaps and cross-linking partner pages	Named when excessive or built solely to cross-link	A real partnership whose page exists for users
Automated link-building software or services	Named as link spam	Nothing. There is no qualified version
Bulk directory and bookmark submissions	Named as low-quality directory or bookmark links	Choosing directories buyers actually use
Guest posts with optimized anchor text	Named alongside advertorials and press releases	Writing for the audience and linking on your brand or a natural phrase
Widget, footer and template links across many sites	Named as link spam	Qualifying them
Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature	Named as link spam	Participating without the link, or accepting rel="ugc"

Two things this table deliberately does not say. It does not say any tactic is approved: the policy documents what counts as a violation, not what Google endorses. And it does not tell you what a link costs, because we have no verifiable figure to give you; if you are weighing whether to outsource this, our breakdown of what a link building service costs is the honest place to start.

How many backlinks do you actually need?

There is no number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. Ask it comparatively instead. For the specific query you want to win, look at the pages currently ranking and count their referring domains, not their total backlinks. That gives you a reference class instead of a target.

That comparison will usually show you two things. First, the gap is smaller than expected on long-tail commercial queries and larger than expected on head terms, which is an argument for choosing your battles rather than building more links. Second, several of the pages ranking will have fewer referring domains than you assumed, because the link count was never the only thing deciding the result.

How long does a backlink take to count, and what should you expect?

Longer than the outreach, and the delay is not under your control. A link has no effect until Google crawls the page carrying it, indexes that page, and processes the link. A new link on a page Google already crawls daily registers quickly. The same link on a rarely-crawled page can sit there for weeks doing nothing, and no amount of following up changes that.

Set expectations accordingly. Google is explicit that "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google", and the same page warns against anyone selling link popularity schemes. Treat any promised timeline or volume as a reason to walk away.

What to measure instead of rankings in the first quarter: referring domains gained, replies received per pitch sent, and whether the pages you earned links on send any referral traffic at all. Those three move before rankings do, so they show whether a program is alive at a point when search results still cannot say anything either way.

When should you abandon a tactic rather than try harder?

After one quarter with a named owner and nothing to show. At that point the useful question is not how to execute better. It is which of the three inputs the tactic actually needed, because a tactic almost always fails on a missing input rather than on effort.

Work it backwards. No replies at all usually means the Domain Rating band was wrong for the prospects you chose, so move to a row that does not need strangers to take you seriously. Replies but no links usually means the asset was the problem: there was nothing on the other end worth linking to. Links but no movement is a different diagnosis entirely, and it belongs to the target page rather than to the link program: check that the page is indexed and that it answers the query more completely than the results above it before you blame the outreach.

Abandoning a row is not a failure. It is the table doing its job, and the row is still there for the stage where you can staff it.

The habit worth building is quarterly rather than weekly: re-read the table every time your Domain Rating band, your headcount or your publishing capacity changes, because a row that was impossible in January is often routine by June, and nobody sends a notification when that happens. This week, open the table, cross out every row you cannot staff today, and put a named owner and a calendar slot against the two that survive. If you would rather have a team run the outreach and the campaigns behind it, our digital PR work is built for exactly that stage.