35+ Link Building Statistics For 2026

You probably know this—backlinks are important for SEO.

Backlinks are links from other websites that take the users to your website. Search engines like Google consider them to be a vote of trust. This is helpful in establishing trust and authority.

Therefore, link building is a common off-page SEO practice.

But to understand how backlinks really affect rankings and their cost, we studied surveys and researches across the internet.

In this post, we list link building statistics that every marketer should know.

Impact of Backlinks on Organic Search Rankings

Google’s official documentation mentions that it considers links from other prominent sites as a quality factor. Links are also an important part of the Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines.

Now, let’s see how actually links are important for SEO through data.

1. There is a strong correlation between the number of backlinks and Google Search rankings. On an average, the #1 ranking page on Google search has 3.8 times more backlinks that pages ranking on the #2 to #10 positions.
2. However, the quality of backlinks is important too. For example, one backlink from a high-authority website is better than ten backlinks from spammy domains. In fact, 93.8% believe in quality over quantity for backlink.

Popular Link Building Strategies

There are many ways to get other prominent websites link to your site. For example, an ideal way is to create content SO GOOD that other sites mention it with a link back.

One commonly used (grey hat) tactic is to ask other websites to exchange links with your site. This is called a backlink exchange that leads to reciprocal links. However, it’s considered as a spammy technique by search engines could lead to penalties.

Here’s what data says about link building strategies:

3. Digital PR is the most popular link building method, used by 67.3% of marketers. It includes acquiring backlinks from news sites, online magazines, etc. You can use your expertise and share it on collaborative articles to build links through platforms like HARO and Help a B2b Writer.
4. You can also build backlinks by writing guest articles/blog posts on other’s websites. In fact, guest posting is the second-most popular method to build backlinks used by 38.9% of marketers.
5. In 2024, 36.3% of SEO experts believed in building link assets, i.e. publishing high-quality articles, original research, infographics, etc. This is a recommended strategy to build high-authority links without violating Google’s guidelines.
6. Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique—although used by only 6.2% of marketers—is still an effective way to build backlinks. It involves publishing content far better than your competitors and outreaching their linking sites.
7. Broken link building still worked in 2024 with 13.3% of marketers still doing it. This method involves finding pages your competitors’ pages that no longer exist and asking their linking sites to link an alternative page on your website.
8. 29% of the brands perform competitors’ link profile analysis to build backlinks.

Other ways marketers are building links include social media, forums, comments on other’s websites, etc. However, most of these techniques merely impact SEO since they’re nofollow links or have UGC tag.

Link Building Email Outreach Statistics

One common practice to build links is by reaching out to other websites through emails. Here is some data on how you can make your outreach campaigns more effective:

9. On an average, the link building outreach emails has a response rate of 8.5%. This shows marketers are strongly interested in offering backlinks to one another for SEO.
10. You can improve the response rates of link outreach emails by up to 33% by personalizing the subject lines.
11. It takes 8 days on an average to land a backlink through emails.
12. Publishers are busy, they receive tens of emails every day, meaning your outreach email may get unnoticed. Data shows that implementing a follow-up strategy could generate 40% more backlinks from the outreach campaigns.

The key takeaway is to plan a personalized campaign with 1-2 follow-ups for effective link building.

Reciprocal Links (Backlink Exchange) Statistics

Exchanging or swapping links between websites is a well-know technique for building backlinks. It’s considered as a gray hat technique. It’s strictly restricted by Google.

However, the SEO community is actively doing it.

13. Almost one-fourth (24.8%) of SEO experts still do link exchanges.
14. In 2022, it was found that 43.7% of 112,440 top-ranking pages had reciprocal links. This means almost half of the websites are still doing direct link exchanges.

Marketers have also adopted more undetectable link building strategies like three-way (a-b-c) link exchanges to keep their link profiles natural.

Backlinks & Content – What’s the Relation?

You see, there are many ways to build backlinks for your website. One of them is through content marketing, which includes publishing content on your or other’s websites.

But what type of content attracts most backlinks? Let’s see through these link building statistics related to content marketing:

15. In 2024, marketers build 68% of backlinks through content marketing efforts.
16. Statistics suggest that 94% of pages have zero outgoing links. Meaning they do not link to any other websites. Only 2.2% of published content is linked by other websites. This means getting backlinks by just publishing content is not easy.
17. There is a direct relationship between the length of content and the number of backlinks. Articles with 3000+ word count get 3.5 times more backlinks than shorter articles.
18. Adding media content like videos to pages can attract more backlinks. On an average, blog posts with over three videos are 55% more linked than posts without them.
19. Content with title starting with “What” or “Why” get 25.8% more backlinks than other topics. Meaning, definition & opinion-based topics are likelier to land you more backlinks.
20. Creating high-quality infographics is a good way to earn more backlinks. Pages with infographic get 178% more backlinks than plain pages.

How Much Does Link Building Cost?

Building links to your website is not easy. It takes time, efforts, and most of the times GOOD CONTENT. In fact, 47.8% of marketers find link building to be the most challenging SEO task.

21. On an average, businesses allocate 28% of their SEO budget to building backlinks.
22. More than one-third (34.14%) of companies doing SEO spend over $1000 every month on link building for their website.
23. Many businesses opt for black hat link building tactics like purchasing links from other websites. A survey found that 74.3% of SEO experts are doing paid link collaborations.
24. On an average, it costs $361 for a paid link.
25. The rate of paid links increases along with the domain authority of the linking site. It could be over $1000 a backlink.

Link Building Tools & Third-party Metrics

Marketers use many tools and third-party metrics to find backlink opportunities, analyze domains, and measure success.

26. Ahrefs is the most commonly used link building tool with 74.3% of marketers using it to analyze websites. Of course, that’s because of its powerful backlinks database.
27. On the other hand, 14.3% of SEO professionals prefer Semrush for link building.
28. A survey found that 68.3% of Link builders rely on third-party metrics like Ahrefs Domain Rating and Moz DA for evaluating website’s quality for backlinks.
29. 69% of marketers use Ahrefs Domain Rating, while 11.5% of them use Semrush Authority Score metric.
30. One SEO study showed that Moz DA score has high correlation with higher rankings on Google than other metrics from tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.
31. Data shows that 51.39% of SEO beginners rely on third-party metrics like while only 28.99% of experts use them. Meaning, these third-party metrics should only be used as cursors while judging a website’s authority.

2026 Link Building Trends

32. In 2024, 17.3% of SEOs were using LinkedIn for link building outreach. It’s highly effective platform to reach website owners and publishers.
33. 29.79% of websites have fewer than three backlinks, while 55.24% of have none.
34. Businesses rely on experts or agencies for building backlinks. In 2024, 60% of businesses were outsourcing link building tasks for their websites.
35. Over half (52%) of the marketers believe in building links with brand names as the anchor text.
36. In 2024, 84.6% of SEO experts were relying on the relevancy of the linking domain with the business for building backlinks.

Do nofollow Links Help SEO?

It’s been a debating question for SEOs.

The rel=”nofollow” is an HTML attribute that directs the crawler not to follow (or crawl) that link. Meaning, the search engine will not open that link and update the page in its index.

In 2019, Google announced it would still consider nofollow links as hints. Meaning, it will not crawl or update the page in its index, but will definitely pass on some value to it. Also, marketers have a positive outlook on nofollow links.

37. In a survey, 89.1% of marketers believed that nofollow links impact SEO rankings. 48% of marketers have nofollow backlinks building as a part of their strategy.

Based on this, it’s a good practice to focus on the quality and method of earning backlinks rather than their rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Future of Link Building – What Do Marketers Think?

Backlinks have remained one of the most exploited ranking factors to trick search engines for higher rankings. Google has

38. 53% of surveyed marketers think backlinks will remain as important as it is today. This means more than half of the marketers are positive about building links as a sustainable SEO strategy for long-term growth.
39. In another survey conducted, 94% of participants believed backlinks will be the top ranking factor for SEO in upcoming years.

That’s all for the link building statistics in 2026.

You see, building links is an effective strategy for improving site’s rankings. You can use these stats to create an enhanced off-page SEO strategy for your website. In our opinion, the best way is not to “BUILD” links, but to “EARN” them. The best way to do this is to create top-notch content, improve brand values, and build partnerships.

Data Sources: GlobeNewswire, uSERP, Authority Hacker, Search Logistics, Aira, Databox, Ahrefs, WPBeginner, Compile, Semrush, Google, Siege Media, Hubspot, ThriveMyWay, Search Engine Journal