Manual Link Building: What It Is and How It Can Help You

Manual link building is the approach to link building that consists of direct outreach with publishers and editors of websites, without any third party tools and with the purpose of obtaining a backlink. 

The process consists of first researching and discovering relevant and reputable websites within your industry. Once you’ve found those websites, you reach out to the people in charge of them to ask for a link pointing to your own site. 

Benefits of manual link building include:

• Quality control: You know where and how your link is going to be placed, giving you reign over backlink context, and allowing you to pick sites that will actually boost your own. 
• Search engine favorability: Search engines prefer backlinks obtained manually, giving your site a better shot to rise up the rankings.
• Fostering relationships: Manual outreach link building requires constant communication, and a result of those constant dialogues are newfound relationships. 

Going forward with manual outreach is indeed difficult, as it requires time put into research, patience in communication, and dedication to keep contacting editors despite many likely rejections. However, since search engines only approve of link building done manually, you should share those principles if you want your site to rank higher. 

Automated link building is the method of link building that relies on a large quantity of low-quality websites in bulk, usually with software and tools, to send email pitches or place links online on a mass-scale.

These tools often produce links in bulk as a way to compensate for their often lackluster hyperlink quality. They work by using software, search operators, and AI to circumvent the repetitive, logistical parts of manual backlink building. 

Benefits of automated link building include:

• Time saving: Links achieved using automated approaches greatly reduce the data collection and outreach procedures.
  
• Large scale: Since the link attainment process is sped up and received from smaller sites, backlinks can be obtained in large sums. 

However, what’s important to note is that these benefits, albeit tempting, are largely short-term. Search engines always prefer quality over quantity, and automated links run the risk of violating that preference because of their reliance on low-quality pages, making their provided links quite similar to PBN backlinks. 

Automated and manual outreach link building are differentiated by their required amount of effort, control over link placements and most importantly search engine approval. 

Regardless of whether you’re link building by yourself or outsourcing the process to one of the top manual link building agencies, you should be aware of the differences between these two. 

The key differences between manual and automated backlink building are:

• Process: Most obviously, when tackling the procedure manually, all the outreach is done directly with editors. 

• Speed: Automated link building happens very quickly, removing the hassle of contacting and creating content during outreach.

• Scale: Since automated tools don’t focus on quality, they can mass-produce backlinks in large sums. 

• Quality and relevance: There are no guarantees for where your link will be placed if done automatically, as opposed to manual outreach guaranteeing the contexts that you want. 

• Risk of penalties: Automated link building violates search engine guidelines, making it risky and unsafe to rely on. 

 

Why you should choose manual link building 

You should always prefer manual link building because it’s valued by search engines and avoids the possibility of being penalized. 

At the end of the day, what matters most is the aid that a backlink can give you, and building links manually is the preferable method for true help. Yes, tools that automatize the process can be beneficial in the short-term, especially with their high volume and speed. Nevertheless, given how they breach search engine rules, they’re unstable.

Furthermore, even if these automated methods weren’t outlawed, their help would pale in comparison to the benefits of manual link building. Search engines prioritize links from quality reputable publications that share a niche with your target pages. Only through a manual approach can you find those pages and convince them to give you links. 

So the key advantages of manual outreach link building are:

• Search engine approval
  
• Upholding quality and relevance 

If you’re still not convinced or think that the effort you’ll have to put into building links manually will go to waste, here’s an example of the spoils proper manual outreach can bring for your site. 

MyHours sought out the help of GoPeak’s manual link building, and saw a consistent stream of traffic make its way to their site throughout the course of four years, eventually reaching 242k organic traffic monthly. That growth totalled a traffic increase of 160%, all thanks to a proper strategy completely done with manual means like link insertions and guest posts.

Now arises the question, how do SEO professionals actually conduct manual link building? 

There’s a wide range of techniques and methods which help to tip the scales in your favor when trying to convince website editors to add your link to their pages. These strategies are emblematic of manual link building as a whole, as they’re not easy, but they do bring results. 

Link Insertions 

Link insertion (also known as a niche edit) is the link building tactic of placing links pointing to your target page inside an already published and indexed article on someone else’s website.

In concept, link insertions are among the simplest manual link building techniques, but there’s a lot of variables that should be accounted for when taking the link insertion route. Namely, when finding the appropriate websites for your link, you need to analyze the potential host’s quality, relevance and health. 

Here’s a step by step guide on how to do link insertions:

• 1: Choose your target pages: You want link placements to benefit your money-maker pages, single out those pages.
• 2: Research pages: Look for websites that fit within your company’s industry, and select sites that have healthy traffic metrics in order to find the specific page where you want your link to be inserted.
• 3: Contact editors/webmasters: This is when you start outreach, talking to the people who run your targeted pages and pitching your link. 

Skyscraper link building

Skyscraper link building is the process of finding content that is being linked to, creating content that’s better, and asking the editors who are linking to the original piece to replace their link with yours. 

What makes skyscraper link building stand out as a method for manually acquiring backlinks is the added amount of effort required. Along with the research for hosts, you need to improve upon a piece of content that’s already trusted by others in your niche. Still, if you’re able to actually build upon your target, this method of outreach can be effective. 

Here’s a step by step guide on how to do skyscraper link building:

• 1: Find proven linkable content:  Search the web for top-performing articles, guides and studies within your industry that have a rich backlink profile.
• 2: Improve upon it: Create a refined and enhanced version of the original piece. “Better” can refer to its length, accuracy, design, flow and other criterion of quality.

• 3: Make your pitch: Contact the owners of pages which were linking to the first work, and offer your superior piece as a replacement. 

HARO link building

Haro link building is the practice of replying to journalist requests on the platform Help a Reporter Out in exchange for a backlink.

With manual link building being the desirable method for higher-rankings, tools and sites have established themselves in the scene acting as ethical shortcuts for the process. HARO is one of those sites, acting as a bridge for journalists and professionals. Reporters from major news and industry sites ask for expert data, quotes and answers. These experts then pitch their answer, and if the asking party uses that information, they provide a backlink 

Here’s a step by step guide on how to do HARO link building:

• 1: Sign up and set up: Go to the official HARO website and register as a source. Then, choose the industry categories that match your organization.
• 2: Filter queries: Scan through the available requests and focus on questions coming from reputable sites that will benefit you. 
• 3: Answer: Write a short but data-rich response that establishes your authority and experience. Make sure to write your answer quickly and don’t forget to add your website URL.

Guest posting

Guest posting is the act of writing and publishing an article for a website that’s not your own with the purpose of obtaining a backlink. 

Guest posting is one of the most widely used methods of manually earning links. Since most websites won’t place links without something in exchange, a well-written article is usually enough to persuade most owners. 

Here’s a step by step guide on how to do guest posting:

• 1: Pick target pages: For guest posting, you need to know which of your pages you’re going to add a link to in order to get the theme of your article right. See which ones are prosperous, and write the guest post accordingly. 
• 2: Find appropriate websites: Look for profitable, healthy and niche-relevant websites that you’d like a link from. 

• 3: Pitch article idea: Contact the webmasters for those sites and offer your article idea in exchange for a backlink. 

• 4: Write article: If the editors accept your offer, write a quality article that the host webpage will approve of, and earn your link. 

Broken Link Building

Broken link building entails finding a reputable website with links that lead to 404 errors, creating a replacement for that link, and asking the host page to replace the dead link with your own.

The internet has been around for a while, and in that timespan links to once healthy URLs constantly lose their connection to meaningful pages. This is where you can come in, and find those links that are no longer valuable before creating and pitching a proper replacement to the site owner. This method is once again fully manual, requiring you to find these pages and directly communicate with owners. 

Here’s a step by step guide on how to do broken link building:

• 1: Find broken pages: Search through pages from websites in your industry that have dead links in them.
• 2: Estimate use case: This is where it gets tricky, as you’ll have to try and figure out what the linked piece’s contents were.
• 3: Create replacement: Once you’ve figured everything out, make a quality substitute for the original link. 

• 4: Conduct outreach: Talk to the site owners and show them your replacement, solving a problem for them and giving your own site a boost in the process.

Yes, one could debate that it’s even more effective nowadays. 

Artificial intelligence has rattled the SEO sphere, making people wonder whether or not there’s still any upside in manual link building at all. Granted, the landscape has changed, but it’s far more akin to adaptation rather than extinction, as manual link building still remains a clear-cut way for sites to earn higher rankings.

Why manual outreach link building still matters:

• Increase in demand for editorial value: With artificial intelligence pumping out low-quality work left and right, editors, webmasters and journalists need human made content in order to secure higher quality.
  
• AI search visibility: Google’s newly implemented AI overview has cut down the amount of people who open up links visible in search results. As such, manually reaching out to the owners of websites that consistently get cited by AI engines has become crucial. 
• No changes in search engine values: AI taking the world by storm doesn’t necessitate that search engines abandon their values. Considering the amount of barebones content that is flooding the web because of AI, search engines stand by their principles, and still reward pages which earn links through ethical means. 

Furthermore, AI doesn’t have to be this SEO boogeyman that brings doom to the industry. Instead, you can choose to see it as a tool which provides a massive boon for your manual backlink outreach process. 

How AI can help you when link building manually:

• Researching host websites: AI models can speed up the search for appropriate websites by knowing the necessary parameters and quickly scanning through the web to provide you with prospects. 
• Analyzing competitors: With access to certain tools, AI models can quickly go through you and your competitors’ backlink profiles before highlighting the gaps and competitor backlinks that you need to fill for your own site. 

Nobody’s perfect, but it’s best to avoid making mistakes beyond just using unethical practices when obtaining backlinks manually.

• Only targeting homepage: To maximize success, it’s best to spread out the target pages your links are connected to. 

• Anchor text sameness: Search engines flag links that have the same exact text as their anchors on a large number of different sites. Make sure to diversify your anchor text. 

• Generic outreach: Using email and message templates to connect with editors and hosts is an easy way to get ignored. Personalization is essential for proper outreach.
• Ignoring AI metrics: AI has become a big part of SEO, so ignoring the statistics that reveal which potential host websites are getting cited by AI is leaving a lot of meat on the bone. 

Manual link building isn’t easy, as it takes painstaking efforts to find the right websites which are actually willing to add your link. Regardless, if you want your efforts to bring results, manual is the only way, as other methods will likely yield less results despite their scale, or bring about intervention.