What Is Link Building? A Plain-English Guide

Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours. That is the whole definition. When a news site, a trade publication, or a respected blog puts a clickable link to your website in one of its articles, that link is called a backlink, and Google treats it as a sign that your site is worth paying attention to. This guide explains what link building is, why it matters, what it costs, and what to avoid, in plain English, for a buyer who has never hired an agency to do it.

I have spent more than 25 years at top New York PR agencies and in-house at the NBA and NASCAR, and this year I was named a 2026 PR News Person of the Year in the Data and Digital PR Disruptors category. I come at this topic from the PR side, which matters, because the backlinks that are hardest to get and worth the most come from journalists, not from software.

What is link building, in simple words?

Think of a backlink as a reference. If the Wall Street Journal links to your company’s research in a story, it is telling its readers, “this source is worth reading.” Search engines read that the same way.

That idea is older than Google itself. In the 1998 Stanford paper that introduced Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page explained that “academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page” as a rough measure of a page’s importance. Their system, PageRank, refined it by not counting every link equally. A link from an important page counts for more than a link from an obscure one.

So link building, in simple words, is earning references from other websites. Some link building is quick and cheap, and some is slow and valuable. The difference between those two kinds is what the rest of this guide is about.

A few terms you will hear:

• Backlink: a link from another website to yours.
• Anchor text: the clickable words in the link, such as “new survey on retirement costs.”
• Referring domain: a website that links to you. Ten links from one site count as one referring domain.
• Domain Rating (DR): a score from the SEO tool Ahrefs that shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile, on a scale from 0 to 100. Many agencies, including ours, use it to grade the sites links come from.

For a longer list of link types, see our guide to types of backlinks.

Why link building matters for SEO

Google says so in its own words. Its link documentation states that Google “uses links as a signal” when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. Its public explainer on how Google ranks results goes further: “one of the factors used to determine quality is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content. This is generally a good sign that the information is trustworthy.”

Read that last sentence again, because it is the best short case for link building I know. Google does not say any website. It says prominent websites. A backlink from a national newspaper and a backlink from a page nobody visits are both links, but they are not the same signal.

Links also help Google find you in the first place. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says Google “primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled,” and that in many cases these are other websites linking to yours.

There is a third benefit people forget. A link in a news story sends real readers to your site. Someone who clicks through from a CNBC article about your industry is already interested in what you do.

None of this means links are the only thing that matters. Technical SEO, meaning a fast site, clean code, and pages Google can read, is the foundation. Think of it as the X’s and O’s. But the foundation keeps you eligible to rank. Earned links from respected sites are what move you up. Our plain-English guide to SEO, AEO, and GEO explains how the pieces fit together.

Backlinks vs. the work that earns them

This is one of the most common questions buyers ask, and the answer is simple. A backlink is the result. Link building is the work that produces it.

Every website collects some backlinks without trying. A customer mentions you on their blog, a directory lists you, a partner links to your home page. Link building is the deliberate effort to earn more of them, and better ones, on purpose.

The word “building” causes some confusion. It sounds like you construct links yourself, the way you would build a page on your own site. You should not. Under Google’s rules, which I cover below, the links that count are links someone else chose to give you. Good link building creates a reason for a respected site to link to you. It does not create the link directly.

That is why I describe the best link building as a PR job. A reporter at USA Today will not link to your product page because you asked. They will link to your company because you gave them a story their readers want, backed by data nobody else has, and your website is the source.

What makes a good backlink?

Not all backlinks are equal, and buyers who skip this part tend to overpay for links that do nothing. When we judge a link at Prism, we look at four things:

1. The site’s authority. A link from a site with a strong backlink profile of its own, usually measured by DR, carries more weight. Our pay-for-performance pricing only bills for links from sites rated DR 50 or higher.
2. Editorial choice. Did a journalist or editor decide to include the link because it helps readers? Or did someone pay for it? Only the first kind is safe and lasting.
3. Relevance. A link from a story about your industry, on a site your buyers read, beats a link from an unrelated page.
4. Whether it passes value. Some links carry a tag, such as nofollow or sponsored, that tells Google not to count them as an endorsement. Google’s guide to qualifying outbound links says paid placements should be marked “sponsored.” We explain the difference in our post on do-follow vs. no-follow backlinks.

I would take a single link that hits all four, say a dofollow link from a national news story about your industry, over a hundred links that hit none of them.

Three methods that hold up

There are dozens of link building tactics. Most buyers only need to understand three that are worth paying for.

Newsworthy studies and digital PR. This is the method that earns links from the outlets that matter most. You answer a question your customers care about with data, then pitch the findings nationally and state by state, because a reporter in Ohio wants to know how Ohio ranks. When the story runs, it links back to the study on your site. Our data-driven studies page shows what goes into one, and our guide to digital PR covers the full process.

Reclaiming links you already earned. Reporters sometimes mention a company without linking to it. Sites also move pages and break old links. Asking for the missing link is one of the fastest wins in link building, because the reporter already chose to write about you. That is what our backlink reclamation work does.

Being a source reporters return to. A steady calendar of studies gives the same outlets a reason to come back. For Seniorly, a senior living marketplace, monthly studies earned 317 stories with editorial backlinks in 2025, and the Seniorly case study lists repeat coverage in Yahoo (10 stories), McKnight’s Senior Living (8), and Entrepreneur (5).

Here is what that looks like in practice. For Social Catfish, an online-safety company, Prism built an annual State of Online Scams study from FBI, FTC, and platform data and pitched it all year. The Social Catfish case study reports 3,862 editorial backlinks at an average DA of 77.3, coverage in CNBC, USA Today, Reuters, and Business Insider, and revenue up 372%. For four Digital Ventures affiliate sites, one year of digital PR link building produced 1,489 editorial backlinks, and the portfolio was acquired by Centerfield.

What Google calls link spam

Google publishes a list of what it calls link spam. Its spam policies define link spam as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” The examples on that list are worth knowing before you hire anyone:

• Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, including paying for posts that contain links, or trading goods or services for links.
• Excessive link exchanges, the “link to me and I’ll link to you” deal.
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.
• Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit.
• Links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.

In plain English: if a vendor offers a menu of guaranteed placements on named sites at fixed prices, ask how those links are earned. If the answer is that money changes hands with the site, that is the kind of link Google tells you not to buy. Google says sites that violate its spam policies “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”

We wrote more about the warning signs in 7 dead giveaways of a low-value link building agency, and our post on the best link building agencies covers the questions to ask before you sign.

How much does link building cost?

Prices vary widely, mostly because “link building” covers very different work. BuzzStream, a software company that sells outreach tools, surveyed about 70 agency leaders and freelancers who offer digital PR. It reported an average cost per link of $597, ranging from about $150 for guest posting to about $800 for large hero campaigns such as data studies. The average monthly contract was $5,458, and half of respondents said they guarantee links.

The same survey found agencies charge about 50% more than freelancers on average, $6,357 a month versus $4,200.

Those numbers are averages, and the cheap end of the range is cheap for a reason. A $150 guest post and a link in a national newspaper are not the same product. Before you compare prices, ask every vendor the same three questions: which sites will the links come from, who decides to publish them, and what happens if no links run.

At Prism we price link building two ways. Our pay-for-performance linkbuilding starts at $1,999 for a newsworthy study, and after that you pay only for DR 50+ backlinks that actually run. No links, no invoice. Our full-service PR and linkbuilding starts at $7,500 a month on a 12-month engagement, with 6 to 12 studies a year.

Why earned links also help in AI search

There is one more reason earned links matter. AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini cite sources, and they lean heavily on the same kind of coverage that produces your best backlinks.

Muck Rack, a media database used by PR teams, studied the links AI tools cite. Its May 2026 report, What Is AI Reading?, found that ChatGPT cites sources in 96% of its responses, averaging five citations per response. About 84% of AI citations came from earned media, and about 27% came from journalism. Paid and advertorial content made up just 0.3%.

Five sources is a short list. If a reporter has written about your competitor’s research and not yours, the competitor is the one an AI tool can point to.

So the news story that gives you a valuable backlink also gives AI tools something credible to say about you. You do not need a separate service for that. It is an outcome of good link building done through earned media. Our post on how to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT walks through it step by step, including a quick way to check what ChatGPT says about you today.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is link building in simple words?

Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours. Google uses those links as a signal of which pages are relevant and trustworthy, so earning them from respected sites can help your pages rank.

Is link building still important for SEO?

Yes. Google’s own documentation says it uses links as a signal and that links from other prominent websites are generally a good sign that information is trustworthy. What has changed is which links count. Earned links from respected sites matter; bought and automated links are classed as spam.

What is the difference between link building and backlinks?

A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Link building is the work of earning those links on purpose. Every site has some backlinks; link building is how you get more of the right ones.

How long does link building take to work?

It depends on your site and your competition. A story that runs with a link counts the day it is published. Building the kind of authority that moves rankings across a whole site usually takes months of steady work, which is why we plan studies on a 12-month calendar.

Can I do link building myself?

You can start. Fix broken links on your own site, ask for links where reporters already mentioned you, and make sure your site is easy for Google to read. Earning links from national outlets is harder, because it takes data reporters want and relationships with the people who cover your industry. You can see the results our team has produced on our case studies page.

The bottom line

Link building is earning links from other websites, and the ones worth having are the ones a journalist or editor chose to give you. Google says so in its own documentation, and AI search tools lean on the same coverage. Skip anything that looks like buying links, focus on giving reporters a reason to cite you, and judge every vendor by the quality of the sites that link back. If you want to see what that would look like for your company, schedule an intro meeting and we will show you where your next backlinks could come from.