How to Create Backlinks (Without Paying for Them)

At a glance

• A backlink is a link on someone else’s page, so you create one either by asking the owner for it or by owning the page yourself.
• The cheapest ask routes are reclaiming unlinked mentions and broken-link building, because the reader already has a reason to say yes.
• Guest posts, research and interviews work, but every one of them leaves the anchor text and the link’s future in the other site owner’s hands.
• Q&A sites, social profiles and directories give you links that are mostly nofollow or ugc, so they bring visitors more than rankings.
• Running your own blogs on expired domains is the one route where you control the link, the anchor and the topic of the linking page.
• Don’t buy links from public networks or link sellers, and don’t sell links from your own sites either.

Creating a backlink means asking for it or owning the page

1. Ask. You give another site owner a reason to link to you: a fix for their broken link, a better resource, a quote, a guest article. They decide whether to link, which words to link from, and whether the link is still there next year.
2. Own. You control the site the link sits on, so you decide all three.

Most guides list a dozen tactics as if they were equals. They aren’t. Below, the ask routes are sorted roughly by how much work each live link costs, with notes on what you control. After that comes the own route, and a table to compare them side by side. If you want the background on what makes one link worth more than another, read what makes a backlink good first. This page is about getting links at all.

The ask routes, ranked by effort per link

1. Reclaim unlinked mentions

This is the cheapest link you will ever get, because you already earned it. Someone wrote about your brand, product or data and didn’t link. All you’re asking for is the attribution.

How to do it:

1. Find the mentions. In Ahrefs, the unlinked mentions method uses Content Explorer: search your brand name, exclude your own domain and turn on the option that highlights domains that have never linked to you (per Ahrefs, fetched 2026-10-28). Semrush offers a Media Monitoring tool that tracks brand mentions (per Semrush, fetched 2026-10-28). A plain Google search for your brand name minus your own domain works too.
2. Check each page by hand. Mention alerts don’t tell you whether the page already links, so open it and look.
3. Send a short note. For example:

Hi Sam, thanks for including our pricing calculator in your post on freelance rates. Could you link the mention to the calculator page (example.com/calculator) so readers can use it? Either way, thanks for the shout-out.

Keep it that short. You’re not pitching anything, only filling in a link the writer could have added in the first place. Some owners have a policy against linking out and will ignore you, which costs you a minute.

2. Broken-link building

Sites link to pages that later die. If you have a page that covers the same thing, the site owner has a reason to swap the dead link for yours: you’re fixing their page.

How to do it:

1. Find dead pages in your niche that still have links. In Ahrefs Site Explorer, open a competitor’s Best by links report, filter for “404 not found” and sort by referring domains (per Ahrefs, fetched 2026-10-28). The Backlinks report on the dead URL then shows who still links to it.
2. Make sure you have a page that genuinely replaces the dead one. If you don’t, write it. Use the Wayback Machine to see what the dead page covered.
3. Email each linking site: name the exact page and the broken link, and offer your page as the replacement.

You can also run it the other way round: Ahrefs’ Broken Links report shows broken outgoing links on any site you want a link from (per Ahrefs, fetched 2026-10-28).

3. Copy your competitors’ link sources

The sites already linking to two or three of your competitors are the ones most likely to link to you. Semrush has a Backlink Gap tool that finds domains linking to competitors but not to you (per Semrush, fetched 2026-10-28), and Ahrefs has a similar Link Intersect tool.

How to do it:

1. Enter your domain and three competitors.
2. Sort the list by the domains that link to at least two of them. Those are pages that cover your topic and link out.
3. For each one, work out why it links to your competitors (a resource list, a review, a quote, a guest post) and offer the same kind of thing.

The same exercise works on your own site. Look at where your existing links come from and which of your pages earned them. That tells you which kind of content other sites in your niche link to, so you can make more of it.

A full guide to checking competitor backlinks is on the way.

4. Original research, data and infographics

Writers need numbers and charts to cite. If you publish data nobody else has, they link to you as the source. Surveys of your customers, an analysis of public data in your niche, or a pricing study you put together from public price lists all count.

How to do it:

1. Pick a question your niche keeps asking and that nobody has answered with data.
2. Collect the data (a survey, your own product data, public records) and publish the method with the results, so other writers can trust it.
3. Turn the main finding into a chart or infographic. Add an embed code under it so other sites can place it with a link back, and put your URL in a small watermark on the image so anyone who copies it still knows the source.

This is slow. One piece can take weeks, and it only pays off if writers in your niche see it, so plan to send it to them directly.

5. Testimonials, interviews and podcasts

Plenty of companies show customer testimonials with a link to the customer’s site. If you use a tool or service and like it, write them a testimonial and ask whether they link to the people quoted.

Interviews and podcasts work in both directions. Being interviewed on a niche podcast or blog usually gets you a link in the show notes or the author bio. Interviewing a well-known person in your niche gets you content they’ll often share and link to.

How to do it:

1. List the tools you pay for and the podcasts and blogs your customers read.
2. Send each a specific offer: a testimonial with a concrete result, or a pitch for one topic you can talk about with authority.
3. When the piece goes live, check the link points where you want it.

6. Guest posts

You write an article for another site and they publish it with a link back to you. It works, and it’s also the most crowded tactic on this list. Editors receive pitches every day, many sites now charge for guest posts (which makes it a paid link), and Google’s spam policies name “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites” as link spam (fetched 2026-10-28).

Keep it to sites your audience reads, pitch one specific article idea, and let the editor pick the anchor. For pitch emails that get answered, see our outreach email templates. A deeper guide to guest posting is coming.

7. Directories, Q&A sites and profiles

These are the links you can create without asking anyone: a business directory listing, a profile on a forum, an answer on Quora or Reddit with a link in it, a social media bio.

They’re the easiest links on this list, and also the weakest. Most of these platforms mark user links as nofollow or ugc. Since 2019, Google has said these attributes “are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search” (Google Search Central blog, fetched 2026-10-28). A hint is not a ban, but you shouldn’t count on these links for rankings. Their real value is the visitors who click through from a useful answer.

Google’s spam policies also list “low-quality directory or bookmark site links” and “forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature” as link spam (fetched 2026-10-28). Use a handful of real directories in your industry, and answer questions only where you have something to say.

The difference between followed and nofollow links gets its own article soon.

The routes compared

Route	Effort per live link	Who picks the anchor	Does the link last?	Cash cost
Unlinked mentions	Low: one short email	The site owner	Usually, once added	None
Broken-link building	Medium: research plus outreach	The site owner	Usually	None, unless you write a new page
Competitor link sources	Medium to high	The site owner	Depends on why they link	None to some
Original research	High: weeks per piece	The site owner	Often for years	Survey or data costs
Testimonials, interviews	Low to medium	The site owner	Until they redesign	None
Guest posts	High: a full article per link	The editor	Until the site changes or dies	Often a fee, which makes it a paid link
Directories, Q&A, profiles	Very low	Mostly you	Until a moderator removes it	None
Your own blogs	High to set up, low per link after	You	As long as you keep the site	Domains and hosting

Every ask route has the same weak spot: the link lives on someone else’s property. They can change the anchor, add nofollow, sell the domain, or delete the page, and you won’t hear about it until you check your backlinks.

The own route: links on sites you control

The alternative is to own the sites that link to you. That’s what a private blog network is: a group of blogs, usually on expired domains that still have backlinks, that you run and link from. Our PBN guide puts the goal simply: “to have control over link-building efforts for your money sites. The alternative is to rely on other webmasters to editorially place backlinks on their sites, which are outside of your control.”

With your own sites, you control where the link points, the anchor text and how closely the linking blog matches your topic. None of the ask routes give you all three.

The process, in short:

1. Buy expired, closeout or auction domains that still have links and authority. The guide’s minimum is 10 Ahrefs Domain Rating and 10 or more referring domains, ideally in your niche.
2. Host each blog with a different hosting provider and IP, so the network doesn’t share an obvious footprint.
3. Restore the old content, add your own, wait a few weeks, test the domain, then link to your site.

It isn’t free. The guide’s honest version is “simple but not easy”: you pay for domains and hosting, and each blog takes time to set up. But once a blog is running, each additional link costs you an article instead of a pitch. For the full walk-through, read how to build your own blog network or download our free PBN guide.

Is this “black hat”? We don’t think so. Black hat means hacking or exploiting other people’s websites. A blog network is your own property. It does go against Google’s guidelines, but as the guide points out, so do bought links, and so do plenty of “white hat” outreach and guest post campaigns.

Where Easy Blog Networks fits. Hosting is where most networks get caught, because blogs that share a host, IP or nameserver are easy to connect. Easy Blog Networks puts each blog with a different brand-name hosting provider, on that provider’s IPs and nameservers. Each blog installs in one click with a random theme, different plugins and a randomized username, and gets automatic WordPress, theme and plugin updates plus daily backups. Plans start at US$39/month for 10 blogs, with a 7-day free trial.

What not to do

Don’t buy links from public networks. Anyone can buy a link on a “PBN” that sells links, which means anyone can find it, including Google. Our guide’s answer to “should I buy PBN links?” is “Absolutely not.” If you build a network, keep it private and never sell links on it.

Don’t buy links from link sellers and guest post marketplaces either. “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes” is the first example in Google’s link spam policy (fetched 2026-10-28), and paid placements on sites that sell to everyone are the easiest links for Google to spot and discount. We cover the question in more depth in do you have to buy backlinks?.

Don’t automate link creation. Tools that post your link to hundreds of profiles, comments or directories produce exactly the low-value links Google’s policy lists by name.

FAQ

How do I create a backlink to my website?

Either ask another site to add one (reclaim a mention, replace a broken link, offer data, a testimonial or a guest article) or publish a link on a site you own. You can’t create a backlink on your own site, because a link from your site to itself is an internal link.

Can I create backlinks for free?

Yes. Unlinked mentions, broken-link building, testimonials, interviews and profile links cost time, not money. Original research can cost a little for data. The own route isn’t free, since you pay for domains and hosting, but it doesn’t involve paying anyone for a link.

How do I get backlinks without guest posting?

Start with unlinked mentions and broken links, since they need only an email. Then publish something other writers want to cite: original survey data, a chart with an embed code, or an interview with a known person in your niche. Get on podcasts and write testimonials for tools you use. Or skip outreach altogether by linking from blogs you run yourself.

Do Quora, Reddit and social media links count?

They count as links. Google treats their nofollow or ugc attributes as hints, so some may pass a little value, but in practice their worth is the visitors who click. Use them where you can answer a question well. More on this in does social media count as backlinks?.

How many backlinks should I create?

There’s no fixed number. It depends on what the pages ranking for your keyword have. We cover the risk side in how many backlinks is too many?.

How long until new backlinks work?

First the link has to be crawled and indexed, which we cover in how long it takes for backlinks to get indexed. A separate guide on how long backlinks take to move rankings is on the way.