Link Earning vs Link Building: What Each Means, What Google Says, and How to Choose

You publish a page and nobody links to it. The advice you get splits in two: go and ask people for links, or make the page so useful that links arrive on their own. Those two approaches have names, link building and link earning, and the argument over which is better hides a more useful question: who starts the link, and what would you need to prove if someone asked?

This post answers the questions people ask about the two. What is the difference, does link building still work, what should you avoid, what does it cost, which kinds of pages earn links, how do you tell if a page is worth linking to, and how do you promote one.

The difference is who starts the link

Link building means you start the link. You find a page, contact its owner, and ask for a mention, or you place content on their site. Link earning means the other site starts it, because they found your page useful. In practice a program can mix both, and the line blurs. A journalist who finds your data on their own is earning. A journalist you emailed the same data to is building. The data is the same.

Google's own guidance leans on the second picture. Its SEO Starter Guide says other sites linking to you "is something that happens naturally over time", and that you can encourage people to discover your content by promoting it. It also warns that you can overdo promotion, and that search engines "may perceive some of the practices as manipulation of search results". Read the guide for the exact wording.

Does link building still work?

Links still matter to Google. The same guide says the vast majority of new pages Google finds each day are found through links. What has changed is which links Google treats as spam. Its spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation, and optimized-anchor links in guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites. Asking for a link is not on that list. A link you asked for, paid for, and tagged as an ordinary link is.

So the question is not "earn or build". Google defines link spam as links made "primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings", so ask whether each link would exist if search engines did not. Our post on which free link methods the policy names checks the common free tactics against that list.

What to avoid

Four patterns to avoid, three of them named in the policy. Paying for links without a rel="sponsored" or nofollow tag. Swapping links in bulk. Sending the same templated pitch to hundreds of sites, which is not in the policy but which we cover in the AI outreach post. And placing guest posts whose only purpose is a keyword link, which our post on what guest post sites accept covers.

What it costs

Published guest post prices vary by vendor and by what was counted, as our post on what a backlink costs and why price studies disagree shows. The more useful number is your own cost per link: hours, tools and payments divided by the links that are live, followed and on pages that get visitors. Measure that for each tactic for a quarter before deciding where to spend.

Types of linkable assets, with examples

A linkable asset is a page made so that other sites have a reason to cite it. Ahrefs' guide to linkable assets by Joshua Hardwick sorts them into six types and gives real examples with link counts. The guide was written in 2018. Treat its counts as old readings, not current ones.

• Visual assets. Infographics, animated graphics and maps. The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors had "8.6K backlinks from 2.3K RDs" (referring domains) in the guide. Hardwick's caution: use a graphic only when the content benefits from being shown visually.
• Online tools and calculators. CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer had "16K+ links from 3.6K+ referring domains". The catch is cost: you need a budget for a developer or the skills yourself.
• Awards and rankings. The World's Billionaires List had "229K links from 10.6K+ RDs". Hardwick notes that a ranking only works as an asset if you already have some authority in your field, and doubts anyone would see an award from his neglected personal blog as meaningful.
• Studies and research. Ahrefs' own study on how long it takes to rank in Google had "1.8K links from 470+ RDs". Ahrefs credits part of that to being a trusted brand with data nobody else has, but says personal case studies can also work.
• Definitive guides and tutorials. The W3Schools HTML Tutorial had "1M+ links from 4.4K+ RDs". To pull one off, the guide says, you need to be an expert on the subject.
• Coined terms. A name for a method that did not exist before, such as Brian Dean's skyscraper technique. The guide calls these very hard to create and pull off.

Ahrefs gives a few reasons people link: a solution to a specific problem, a unique angle on a topic, backing for a point they are making, or something their audience would find interesting.

How to tell if a page is linkable

Earning depends on the page, so test it before you promote it. This checklist is ours, not Google's.

1. Does it contain something a writer cannot get elsewhere: original data, a tool, a method with a name, a primary-source summary?
2. Can someone cite it in one sentence, such as a number, a rule or a definition?
3. Is it the best answer to one specific question, not a general guide to a whole field?
4. Is it easy to quote and credit: stable URL, clear author or organization, a date?
5. Would you link to it if it were on someone else's site?

If you answer no to the first two, the page gives a writer little to cite, and promotion alone may not change that. Our post on digital PR for editorial links covers how to get a good asset in front of the people who need it.

How to promote one asset

An asset does not earn links just by existing. In Hardwick's words, linkable assets do not attract links "out of thin air" unless you promote them. Google's SEO Starter Guide lists social media, community engagement, advertising and word of mouth as ways to promote new content, and newsletters to people who agreed to receive them. Here is a plan for one asset, built from those two sources.

1. Find people already writing about the problem. Search the question your asset answers and list the pages that discuss it. Ahrefs' example: a calculator for homebrewers fits articles that explain the formula it replaces, because readers of those articles would find the tool useful.
2. Find pages that link to weaker versions. Look up the pages that rank for your topic, export the sites that link to them, and note why your asset is more complete. These people have already linked to something similar, so the guide says you do not need a hard sell: tell them the asset exists and why it is worth a look.
3. Tell anyone you featured. For a ranking or award, let each person or site on the list know. Some will share it, and some will add it to their own awards page with a link.
4. Tell your own audience. Send it to your email list and share it where your readers already gather. In 2018 Ahrefs ran paid social ads for most new posts, and the guide says paid promotion can indirectly result in links.
5. Update it and tell people again. In 2018 Ahrefs refreshed its guides, then repeated the email, ads and outreach. For one guide it shows a clear spike in referring domains each time the post was updated.

Two limits apply. Ahrefs is a well-known brand, and the guide admits that people may link partly to do it a favor. And keep within Google's line: telling people about a page is promotion, but paying for links that pass ranking credit or trading them in bulk is the link spam covered above. Google's guide also warns you can overdo promotion: people tire of it, and search engines may read some of it as manipulation.

How to combine them

Earning is slow and uncertain, and a new site has little to earn from. Building without a good asset is expensive and fragile. A reasonable order is to make one asset that passes the checklist, tell the handful of people who would use it, then watch what comes back. Anything you do beyond that should pass the would-it-exist-without-search-engines test.

After links arrive, confirm what you have. SerpCrest's bulk DoFollow checker shows whether each link is live, followed and indexed, so you know what you earned and what you only expected.