There’s no doubt that content and links are the main ingredients of successful search engine optimization. But is creating top-notch content or offering decent service bound to succeed in getting lots of quality backlinks (or any at all)? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
Many people find building links to their content much more complicated than actually creating it, so they neglect it. As a result, we have more than 90% of content getting zero traffic from Google.
That’s pretty sad since there are tons of high-quality pages ranking above the 3rd page of search results, simply because search engines don’t have enough signals to rank them higher.
In reality, link building is not rocket science, and everyone can do it, investing only some time and effort. Let’s jump into it and see how to build free backlinks.
1. Start with Awesome Content
Trust me, it’s much easier to get links to stunning content rather than to go all out trying to promote something mediocre. That’s why you should create content with backlinks in mind.
It’s easier said than done, you may say. Well, this is how it works. Consider this hacks that will help you create linkable content:
- Produce in-depth content. People love sharing and linking to articles that cover the topic in detail.
- Make it viral. Creating viral content is not an easy task, but you have to try. Make sure it’s practically useful, demanded, and provides with some fresh angle on the subject. Extensive lists, comprehensive guides, and revealed hacks are more likely to go viral bringing you desired backlinks.
- Quote or refer to influencers. This technique is also called ego bait → you mention influencers in a positive way, and chances are they will share and link to your content.
- Give something away. You may create a free tool and make it publicly available on your site. For example, Ubersuggest brought Neil Patel around 50,000 backlinks. You don’t need to create anything super complicated, just take a look at simple Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule which attracted more than 250,000 backlinks.
Following these tips, you may actually get backlinks not doing any link building. However, it’s impossible to go viral or engage with influencers each time you release something new. The next methods are more reliable in this context.
2. Social Media Buzz
Backlinks from social networks won’t have any direct effect on your SEO. Instead, it’s one of the best ways to promote your content to your target audience. Share link-worthy content to niche relevant groups, engage with influencers, build your own community, and other website owners will more likely link to it.
This is how social media and SEO work together.
3. Forum Backlinks
Just like punks forums are not dead. In fact, some niche forums still attract a huge number of visitors every month. 
Forget about spamming your links on forums in 2019, they are strictly moderated, and you will get banned almost immediately. Become a regular member and share relevant content with other members. Such backlinks will not only benefit your SEO but also drive targeted traffic.
One of the world-famous forums/boards is Reddit. Generating over 1.6 billion monthly visitors, it’s a perfect opportunity to show yourself to a humongous audience and get some high-quality backlinks.
Remember: no one likes spammers, read the rules, and be helpful.
4. Backlinks from Q&A Sites
Quora is probably the biggest Q&A site out there. All backlinks from Quora are nofollow, but this doesn’t make them useless.
Spend some time googling random things (especially ‘how-to’-type queries), and you will most definitely see Quora popping on the first page of search results. This means backlinks from these pages will not only enlarge your backlink profile but also drive traffic.
Search for relevant questions and answer them adding a link to your site. Add relevant links to answer wiki to increase their prominence.
5. Links from List-Type Posts
Irrespective of your niche you’ve probably seen articles like ‘Top-N Keyword’, ‘N Best Keyword’, ‘List of Best Keyword’ listing your competitors but not you. What can you do to appear in such list? Nothing but contact the creator and ask to add you.
Not all bloggers will give a positive response, but some will be glad to widen their list. You can contact authors via email or through their socials. Be nice, helpful, and don’t be bumptious. At the end of the day, no one is obliged to give you a link.
6. Broken Link Building
Broken links are links pointing to pages returning 4xx-5xx status codes. You probably know that you should fix these such links on your site, as they decrease its overall quality. But broken links on other resources can become a source of high-quality backlinks for you. Finding broken links pointing to a non-existing page and asking the webmaster to replace the broken links with your own content is called broken link building.
Collect a list of big niche-relevant websites and scan them using an SEO spider (I’ll be using Netpeak Spider).
Enable crawling of external links on the ‘General’ tab of crawling settings. Make sure the ‘Links’ parameters group is enabled on the ‘Parameters’ tab in a sidebar. Enter website address and start crawling.
When crawling is complete, filter all pages to see only external ones returning 404/410 status codes. Use the ‘AND’ filter logic.
Now go to the ‘Database’ menu → ‘Incoming Links’. Here you will see all the external links to broken pages with their anchors and pages they are located on. 
Skim through all the links or filter by anchor text to find relevant broken pages you could possibly replace with links to your site. Then send a friendly email to the webmaster pointing on a broken link on their website and asking if it could be replaced with your link.
Don’t expect huge reply rates. If you scale this method by sending 100 automated emails, getting 10 contextual links is a victory.
7. Write Testimonials
You probably use quite a lot of tools in your everyday routine. Most of them have a ‘Testimonials’ page on their website, and some will link back to your site as a credential under your review. Write detailed positive feedback, and a link is in the bag. 
Some companies, especially start-ups, track press mentions and add them to their Media Mentions pages. In this case, you can write a brief review or mention the company or its product on your site.
8. Linkless Brand Mentions
This method works great for those who have been in the game for some time. It’s a typical case when people mention your brand on the web but don’t link to your site. Sometimes they do it on purpose, sometimes they don’t care about linking at all.
So how can you turn mentions into backlinks? First, let’s find where people cite your brand using the search query:
“brand name” -site:yoursite.com
For example, this is how you can find where MailChimp was mentioned:
“mailchimp” -site:mailchimp.com
“mail chimp” -site:mailchimp.com
Tip: try searching by not only your brand name but also your products, your full name, slogan, etc.
Second, you need to export search results you’ve got. This process is called search engine results scraping. You can either create a custom script for this task or use scraping tools. I’ll use the SERP scraper in Netpeak Checker. We’ll need it not only for scraping.
Go to the ‘SE Scraper’ feature and paste all your search queries in the corresponding box.
Choose the search engine you want to scrape and set the number of results. If you want to get only recent mentions, go to the ‘Search engines’ tab and set date and time.
I’d recommend using proxies if you want to scrape Google. The thing is that it’s against their terms of use, so they try hard not to allow it (CAPTCHA is the primary weapon against scraping).
Hit the ‘Start’ button. When scraping is complete, click ‘Transfer URLs‘ to transfer all unique URLs to the main table. Copy the list to the clipboard (CTRL+C).
Now you need to check what pages link back to your site and what only mention your name. To complete this task, we need the SEO spider from the 6th method.
Start Netpeak Spider, paste the URLs from the clipboard (simply press CTRL+V on the main table).
Go to ‘Settings’ → ‘Scraping’ and enable HTML scraping. Set the RegExp scraping mode, search space – all source code, name your parameter, and use the following regular expression:
<a [^>]*\bhref\s*=\s*”([^”]*yoursite.com[^”]*)
Start crawling. When it’s done, go to the ‘Scraping’ tab in a sidebar and select ‘Not found’. These are the URLs that don’t link back to your site.
Finally, you can go back to Netpeak Checker and check these URLs for parameters like Domain/Page Authority and scrape their emails.
Send a friendly email to the webmaster asking if they could add a link to your site. Rules are the same – don’t be pushy, and be helpful. This method has higher chance of success because authors are already familiar with you.
9. Uncredited Content
On the contrary to linkless brand mentions that are completely legal, uncredited content is considered stolen. It can be text pieces, images, GIFs, videos, infographics.
Tools like Plagiarism Checker can help you find places where your content was plagiarized. Its premium subscription allows checking up to 10,000 pages in a single check.
To find uncredited images, make a list of the most important/popular images on your site (logo, infographics, etc.) and use Google Image Search.
As an example, searching for SEO 101 ebook cover, I found some blogs using it but not linking to Search Engine Journal (see I also don’t link to SEJ here, maybe they will reach out to Cody and ask for a link, who knows).
If you create videos and upload them on YouTube, you can check who embedded them on their website using YouTube Analytics. Go to your Youtube Studio page → Analytics → Traffic Source: External. 
Here you will see external traffic sources driving traffic to all your videos. You can do the same check for any particular video. To filter by certain video, click on your account name in the top-left corner of the traffic source page and select the video.
You can find where a particular video is located on a website using HTML scraping (just like in the previous method). Right-click on a video you will search for and copy its embed code. You’ll need a part of this code.
How the code looks like:
<iframe width=”800″ height=”450″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/j5HIB5rEHR0” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>
Copy the URL and paste it into the following XPath value:
//iframe[contains(@src ,’www.youtube.com/embed/j5HIB5rEHR0‘)]
Set data extraction to ‘Attribute’, and use the ‘src’ attribute. Start crawling.
Go to the scraping results to see what pages contain your video. Check whether the site owner linked back to you as the author and ask for a link if they didn’t.
Final Thoughts
Backlinks from high-quality sources will dramatically increase your chances to be visible in search. Try all the nine methods and sort out the most appropriate ones. Add them to your link building strategy and track their results to find what works best.
