Matt Kenyan reveals 14 backlinking strategies that are effective in 2025, covering content-driven link building, micro tools, data surveys, digital PR, competitor analysis, and more. He also highlights outdated tactics to avoid, such as link farms and over-optimized anchor text, and stresses the importance of building real relationships.
A short editorial from the SEONIB team on why this content matters.
Matt Kenyan delivers a practical, data-driven roadmap for link building in 2025, emphasizing relevance, relationships, and creative content assets over traditional quantity-focused tactics.
What sets this video apart is its hands-on walkthrough of tools like Ahrefs and AI assistants to generate linkable ideas, plus a clear warning against outsourcing—a stance that aligns with SEONIB's AI-driven but human-centric publishing philosophy.
SEO professionals and business owners should watch this video to master the 14 strategies, then immediately audit their current backlink profile and replace outdated tactics with relevance-first approaches.
A hyperlink from one website to another, used by search engines as a signal of authority and relevance.
A metric predicting how well a website will rank, influenced by the quality and quantity of its backlinks.
The degree to which the linking site's topic aligns with your content, now more important than sheer authority.
Using data, surveys, and media outreach to earn backlinks from authoritative news and industry publications.
Finding dead links on relevant sites, creating a replacement resource, and asking the site owner to link to yours.
Writing content for another site in exchange for a backlink; modern approach focuses on value and keyword gaps.
The clickable text of a hyperlink; over-optimization with exact-match keywords can trigger Google penalties.
A permanent redirect that passes link equity from an old URL to a new one, often used when acquiring aged domains.
Do backlinks still matter in 2025?
Yes, strongly. The #1 result in Google has 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2-10, but quality and relevance now trump quantity.
What is the most important factor for a backlink today?
Relevancy. A single link from a relevant site can be more impactful than millions of low-quality links, as confirmed by Google's John Mueller.
How can I find linkable asset ideas?
Use Ahrefs Content Explorer with filters like word count and referring domains, then analyze top pages to create a better, more comprehensive asset.
What is a micro tool backlinking strategy?
Build a small, free browser-based tool (e.g., a calculator) that solves a user problem. Tools can attract thousands of backlinks, especially with AI-assisted coding.
How does digital PR help with backlinks?
By creating original data or surveys and pitching journalists. Journalists love linking to statistics, and tools like idiot.online can surface data-driven story ideas.
What is competitor link analysis?
Using tools like Ahrefs Link Intersect to find sites linking to your competitors but not to you. Then reach out with a better resource or angle to earn those links.
How do I do guest posting effectively in 2025?
Find non-competing sites in your niche and offer to write on keyword gaps they're missing. Use content gap analysis to show them value, then propose a guest post.
What link building tactics should I avoid?
Avoid link farms, paid link schemes, over-optimized anchor text, and outsourcing your entire link building to agencies—these can cause manual penalties.
Can I outsource link building?
Only partially. Outsource specific tasks like outreach or content development, but as a business owner, you must be involved—quality links come from personal relationships.
What is the Wikipedia dead link strategy?
Find Wikipedia pages with dead links relevant to your content. You can edit the page to replace the dead link with yours, then also reach out to sites linking to that dead Wikipedia page.
SEONIB automatically generates AEO-optimized pages, embeds schema, and submits them to IndexNow — so your content gets discovered faster by Google and AI answer engines.