24 min 
Itching to buy a link or two just to gain a competitive advantage over your rivals quicker?
While it might seem a good idea in the moment, buying links or engaging in any other spammy black-hat link building strategies never works out well long-term.
But if you want to do link building right, your methodology should be in line with Google’s vision, i.e., include white-hat link building tactics.
In this guide, we will share everything you need to know about acquiring links white-hat style and reveal our most-favorite strategies.
What is White-Hat Link Building?
White-hat link building is an SEO strategy that involves organic ways of link acquisition from high-authority websites to boost traffic and gain more visibility in search engine results.
The term white-hat link building was coined as a result of the emergence of many questionable and shady SEO techniques, such as paid links and excessive link exchanges. Thus, we so the emergence of Google’s algorithm updates
If a website engages in the activities mentioned in the image above, the ultimate punishment can be a manual penalty. And there’s a chance that no matter what you do, your website won’t recover from it.
So, it’s one benefit to engage in white-hat link building instead of investing in black-hat SEO, but there are definitely more. Let’s discuss them in detail.
3 Important Benefits of White-Hat Link Building
We’d say that white-hat tactics have three benefits, which are the most crucial for successful off-page SEO:
Benefit #1: Long-term results
Yes, white-hate link building strategies take a long time to start working. However, the effects also last longer, unlike with low-quality black-hat tactics.
Let us show you.
Do you remember the case of JC Penny from 2011?
Briefly, they arranged hundreds of links with very descriptive anchor text on multiple websites unrelated to their industry. Evidently, the SEO firm that worked as the company’s contractor engaged in buying links on private blog networks, directories, and other irrelevant sites to improve JC Penny’s search rankings.
And it worked. Until the Penguin update.
Below, you can see how long the website’s traffic couldn’t properly recover and start growing
This brings us to the conclusion that purchased links fix your traffic situation only temporarily.
Now, let’s consider the opposite approach — a white-hat method called relationship link building.
Right here, you can see a page that belongs to our client’s website from the B2B niche. We started actively building links to it in the third quarter of 2022 and continued doing so this year:
As you can see, the page survived the December Link Spam update and gained full strength after the recent Core Update. The links were acquired from relevant, high-quality websites belonging to legit brands.
If you compare both examples, you’ll see that results from black-hat link building are short-lived
Benefit #2: Stronger online reputation
Do you know what’s one of the main ingredients in the success of Brian Dean’s Backlinko blog?
You might say original, great content, and you’ll be absolutely right. However, more importantly, this content’s originality also makes it a lucrative linkable asset.
But don’t take our word for it.
Let’s take Brian’s latest blog post on using reverse outreach to build links
If we zoom in on actual referring domains, we’ll see quite a few well-known websites with a solid presence and visibility:
To cut a long story short, Brian Dean wrote a unique piece of content that the SEO community finds highly valuable. Creating linkable assets like this is a white-hat link building tactic, as it allows for the natural acquisition of editorial links that deliver referral traffic.
From a bigger perspective, as you produce more of such content, it strengthens your reputation, increases trust, including from Google, since backlinks from high-authority sites are a strong vote of confidence.
Moreover, it adds to the possibility of future collaboration opportunities with other brands within your industry, which we’ll talk about next.
Benefit #3: Foster strong relationships
As a relationship-based link building agency, we vouch for this approach, and here’s why.
Whenever we get a new client, let’s say, in the SaaS industry, it’s not always necessary to start the link acquisition process to their website through cold email outreach. Instead, we actively use the resources with which we’ve built strong relationships over time.
This helps us ensure our client gets high-quality, relevant links in their backlink profile.
Here’s an example of a few links we built to a client’s page in February-March 2023 using relationship-based link building:
Like all other white-hat techniques, the relationship-based method takes time to work, and cold email outreach in the first stages of forming relationships is inevitable.
Yet, none of the other approaches can compare to the long-term effect of this tactic, not to mention the positive impact on your reputation.
White-Hat vs. Black-Hat Link Building
The main difference between white-hat and black-hat link building is that the first aligns with Google guidelines, whereas the second one doesn’t.
People engage in black-hat tactics simply to get the effect sooner rather than later. In such instances, they don’t really care about the long-term impact. Their key interest is in getting results as quickly as possible, mainly through using the following strategies:
- Buying links
- Excessive link exchanges
- Using automated programs that generate links
With the white-hat method, your investment in link building time- and effort-wise will be more substantial. This approach requires extensive work on both on-page SEO and off-page SEO sides, which would guarantee that the final result meets your expectations.
While we’re on the topic, we can’t omit grey-hat link building.
Grey-hat approach is a type of link building that involves both white-hat and black-hat techniques, approximately with a 70%-30% ratio in favor of white-hat SEO techniques. However, this approach also aims for temporary rather than long-term results and manipulates search engine results pages.
10 White Hat Link Building Techniques to Consider
Now that you know the basics about white-hat backlink acquisition, let’s turn to practice.
We’ve compiled a list of ten practices you can mix and match to create a successful link building strategy with long-term tangible results. Let’s dive in!
Technique #1: HARO
HARO
Essentially, once you sign up, the website serves you with queries from journalists three times a day, from Monday to Friday. Here’s an example of a HARO email:
