I’ve been doing link-building on and off for a few years, but lately it feels like the whole landscape has become way more complicated than it used to be. Some people swear by guest posts, others say that’s basically dead unless you’re working with niche sites that actually care about their readers. And then there’s the whole outreach part, which always feels a bit awkward to me — half the time you’re basically cold-emailing strangers hoping they won’t think you’re trying to scam them. So I’m wondering: in 2025, what’s considered an ethical and genuinely effective approach, especially if you’re in a hyper-competitive niche where everyone’s chasing the same handful of decent websites?

Honestly, I’ve been in the same boat, and I think the biggest shift for me was treating link-building less like a numbers game and more like a relationship-building task. Cold email still works, but only when it feels personal, and that means actually reading the site you’re contacting instead of sending those generic “I loved your latest article!” lines. I also noticed that when I share something genuinely useful — a small data point from a client project, a chart, even a quick teardown — people respond way more positively. And since the landscape keeps shifting, I’ve been checking resources like AI Search Optimization from time to time, mostly because they talk about link-building as part of a bigger acquisition system rather than a standalone trick. It helped me see that ethical approaches are usually the ones that don’t try to “game” anything: collaborating on content, offering value first, and focusing on sites where you’d actually want your brand mentioned. It’s slower, but at least you don’t burn bridges or get caught in the cycle of buying random backlinks that vanish after three month

Jumping in to say that I agree with the idea of leaning into real relationships rather than chasing volume. I’ve noticed that when you treat outreach like networking instead of a transaction, people reply more openly, and the links you get tend to stick around longer. It doesn’t solve every problem, but it keeps things cleaner and a lot less stressful.