Link building advice from 2013 to 2017, checked in 2026

Paddy Moogan was sitting across from me at SMX Sydney in April 2013, telling me the cheapest link building tactic he knew. Run your company logo through Google Image Search, find everyone who's used it, thank them, and ask for a credit. In his words: "you don't even have to ask for a link, you ask for a credit, which is a link."

I said I'd take his photo and make him find our interview by reverse image search. He called it good fun. He was being polite.

That chat became half of episode 7 when Season 1 went out in late 2017 (I even say back when we spoke in 2013 in the intro). The other half is Jon Cooper, who I caught at SMX Sydney in 2014. Jason Acidre was recorded in Adelaide in 2017 and Gary Illyes in 2016. So the link advice on our tapes runs from 2013 to 2017, plus two later interviews for comparison.

Since then Google has put an AI spam fighter onto links, and a lot of searches now end in an AI answer that cites a handful of sources and skips the rest. I went back through every tactic and checked it against 2026.

The ones that aged well

Ask for credit when people use your stuff. Paddy's logo trick works better now, for a reason none of us saw coming. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions correlated with appearing in Google's AI Overviews at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. Ahrefs is careful to say correlation isn't causation. Still, the mention is now worth something on its own. So ask for the credit link, and if you don't get it, the unlinked mention is still doing some work.

Fix the links you already have. Paddy again: a client had success "just finding their broken links", old pages that other sites still pointed at, and sorting them out. Then a tip he credited to Wil Reynolds: search your backlinks for misspellings of your own domain, because "everyone always spells stuff wrong". Both still work. These links were earned years ago, nobody else will fix them for you, and a site rebuild with sloppy redirects is the usual way they get lost.

Make something with someone else's data. Jason's favourite was "actual partnerships, like collaborating on creating content, like using other companies' data", with proper credit to whoever supplied it. Then the bigger point: the people who get tons of links are the ones who "discovered something, then publish, be the first one to publish it. They become the instant resource."

When I interviewed Tim Soulo at Chiang Mai SEO in late 2018, his favourite tactic was the same idea: "creating something worthy of being mentioned and reaching out to people who can possibly mention it" (the written interview is here). That's how Ahrefs promotes its own research.

This one has aged the best. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode use "query fan-out", running several related searches across subtopics and picking supporting pages from what's already indexed. It's hard to leave original data out of an answer when nobody else has it, which is create something people can link to all over again.

Do outreach as a person. Jason said outreach means being "more focused on the human side of the practice itself rather than the science". Paddy always pitched as himself from his own work address, and people started recognising his name. His model was PR: "you build relationships with people so you don't always email and ask for links, you just get them eventually." Automated pitches have never been cheaper to send, so one that's obviously from a real person stands out.

The ones that changed

Resource page outreach. Jon described netting a couple of hundred linking domains from resource page outreach, and he was honest about the maths: "you're not converting it more than 5% to 10% at best." The logic holds. But a page that's just a list of links is exactly what an AI answer now summarises for people, so there's less reason for anyone to keep one. I'd still do it for a genuinely useful guide, just with a shorter, better matched list.

Broken link building on other people's sites. Jason made a point of saying Napoleon Suarez invented the outreach side of it, and that the people who got famous for it were the ones who wrote the big guides afterwards. Once a tactic has a "bible", everyone's doing it. It works when your replacement page is truly better than the dead one. A mass pitch doesn't.

"Links have many, many years left." Jon quoted Matt Cutts and said links were "still the basis of the algorithm", but that they "will slowly trim down over time". Tim told me in 2018 he still thought links were "fundamental" to how Google works. In 2024 Gary said at SERP Conf that "we need very few links to rank pages", then said he shouldn't have said it. Jon's "slowly trim down" was the most accurate prediction in the whole episode.

Build or earn depends on your industry. Jon said it plainly: in payday loans, insurance or gambling, "you try naturally attracting links to content that's actually gonna move the needle, like good luck." Paddy agreed that "create great content and you'll get links" mostly works for big sites people already know. Still true. Small brands in dull industries have to go and get attention. It won't turn up on its own.

The one that was dead on arrival

Buying links. Gary gave me the best line on it in 2016: buying "five thousand links from a Russian spammer" is "not a good idea in general but sure, it could work for a few hours." He also admitted that publishing PageRank is how link spam started: "We did start a new industry, I guess."

Paddy's old test sites, built on "really bad spammy links", don't rank for anything anymore. Jason forwarded paid placement offers straight to the client rather than touch them. And when I interviewed Lily Ray in 2022, she'd just told a room at SMX Paris, "You should stop buying links. It's not a good idea", and people came up afterwards asking what she meant (more in the written interview).

Google's December 2022 link spam update put SpamBrain on the job "to neutralize the impact of unnatural links". So now it might not even work for a few hours.

The scorecard

What I'd do now

• Run your logo, product photos and team headshots through a reverse image search. Ask for credit where there isn't any.
• Pull your backlinks, filter for pages that return a 404 and for misspellings of your domain, and redirect or ask for a fix.
• Find one dataset only you have (jobs, prices, customer questions) and publish it properly, ideally with a partner who'll share it.
• Write every pitch as yourself, to one named person, about something their readers would actually want.
• Search your brand name in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Mode. Note who gets cited, then go and earn a mention on those sites.
• If someone offers to sell you links, forward it to the bin.

Paddy finished our chat with this: "a good link builder will get your links... a great link builder will get your links that it didn't ask for." In 2026 I'd add mentions to that. If you want more, Paddy's The Link Building Book is on the Aira site, and our written interviews with Paddy and Jon are on kwasi.com.