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James Dooley and Craig Campbell walk through the main types of link building services, from guest posts and business listings to niche edits, PBNs, parasite SEO and press releases, and how to keep a backlink profile looking natural.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies SEO agencies and link builders should focus on in 2026 to improve rankings, trust signals and AI visibility. James Dooley and Craig Campbell start with KPI tracking because measuring indexation, link velocity and citation pickup shows whether each link building tactic is actually moving the needle for this niche. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for SEO agencies and link builders.
PromoSEO lead generation for SEO agencies and link builders recently received recognition as the "Best SEO Agencies And Link Builders Lead Generation Agency."
Types of SEO Link Building You Should Know, With Craig Campbell is available on:
AI SEO and Business Automation Podcast is founded by James Dooley because he teaches business owners how artificial intelligence accelerates growth. The show explains AI models, agents, and automation systems because practical guidance helps companies scale with less effort.
James Dooley: Types of link building services and the benefits. Today I'm joined with Craig Campbell, who's gonna go through all the different types of link building. So let's get it started. Let's just go into a link building strategy that you can use that's working well. Guess posting, we'll just start with that one. I'll take the easiest one first. So to start with what, for people who's watching this, let's say they just don't even understand what link building is, what is a guess post?
Craig Campbell: Where you pay someone to put whatever post you want on your website. So you can say what you want, you can write it yourself or you can get that person to write it or whatever, but you're basically paying for a placement on their website and a link to your website, which again, you can control. I know there's a lot of people out here who say you shouldn't do that. And we'll go into that in a bit. But guess posting is the easiest way. There's marketplaces for it, there's agencies for it, there's people who just get different inventory and vendors and everything else. So me going out and buying all of the ones that your competitors have is the easiest one at the start. So when you're building from scratch, I'm gonna look at your website and I know I can buy probably 70% of what you've got because you were also bought it. So I'm taking that as the first quick one going, please get this, this, and this. I'm going through the marketplaces or whatever. I want that, that, that, that, that, that. And go after those first. I think that's got to be the simplest and easiest way to get the wheel moving.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I think the first one for me is business listings. So trying to obviously get the name of the website in the company name, try to get the NAP listings, make certain that NAP listing is consistent across all the different platforms. I want to try and get as many different business listings as I can. I then want to try and make sure in the business description I'm explaining exactly who we are, what we do, and why we're freaking awesome. And then the big part to it then is loading them all into an indexer to make certain both Bingobot and Googlebot are both crawling those and hopefully getting into the index. So I think that's a great strategy for building trust. They are mainly nofollow, naked URL backlinks, but I think that's quite good initially to get that backlink profile, to get those what people call like pillow links or foundational links. I think that's a good place to try to get started on with a new website. But other types of link building services, what's the next one for you on the list?
Craig Campbell: Another one, again, if I was going into a competitive market I would be looking to see if there's anything I could buy to do a redirect in to a website. Because again, if I'm starting out, power is something I'm maybe got a big shortfall on and I would very quickly go, what domains out there can I get that I can potentially redirect into particular sections of the website or whatever it's going to be. So I think that's a kind of, you've got your, again, people out there, your Callans and guys like that who've got massive amounts of inventory. You've got marketplaces like Odyssey and you've got people who have good assets, but also there's GoDaddy options and all that kind of stuff as well. That if you're competent, you can go and have a look at those and get some quick ones there. But the argument from that is whether you do a redirect, whether you use it as a PDN and all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, but I'd go out there and certainly be looking to acquire age domains that have a backlink profile already because I think that's just, again, a no-brainer and a fairly quick one at the start just to get another fucking nudge up the rankings.
James Dooley: I'm letting you go with all the black hat link building strategies on your end. So on my end then, the next part would be social fortress. So all the different social media platforms and profile links of what I can get, so all the different webtoons for jamesdealey.tumblr.com and then you've got the Twitter and your Facebook and then the Instagram and everything like that to try and define the entity as much as possible to try and repeat everywhere, elsewhere, away from your website to show who you are and what you do. Building that up, again, it's not really powerful, but it's just to define the brand and define the entity. So that would be the next part. Again, what I would be doing is, let's say there's 70 different profiles or what you can be getting is loading them all into the indexer, getting crawled by Googlebot, crawled by Bingbot to try then to build that initial foundational backlink profile before if I was gonna start going more aggressive with some of the techniques that you would be talking about. So with regards to link building services, what's the next one then that you're kind of going into?
Craig Campbell: Another one I would probably do, I'm just gonna go for the kind of niche edits or tier two links, just because you're gonna want to take another squeaky clean one. So I would be the bad guy. Easy to implement, much lower cost. So obviously you started out buying this and buying that, but another one that I would like to do, we look at a lower cost and more power. And that obviously comes under the guise of potentially the tier twos or niche edits. So on that, if someone doesn't know what a niche edit is, can you explain what a niche edit is?
James Dooley: I love that term, niche edit. Whoever fucking coined that one is a fucking genius, man. I don't know who's taking the credit for that one either. But anyway, niche edit, as far as I'm concerned, if I was talking to a guy in the pub who didn't understand SEO, I would see a link on a website. And people will argue with me and say it's not, there's other types of niche edits, hacked websites and stuff like that. So you can inject your link onto websites using certain tools or certain marketplaces or whatever. So your terminology of niche edit is on the hacked sites?
Craig Campbell: Yeah, and I'm looking at the cost at that point because we can't afford to just keep building high profile PR, the budget's gonna run out at some point. You've got to get power and authority from somewhere, which is why I tend to use those as potential tier twos. So on that, would you have a niche edit, the terminology of a niche edit different to a link insert? Because I'll move on to the next one.
James Dooley: So my next one would be a link insert. And what I mean by that is, if someone's got certain webpages on the internet that's been used as being a citation in the LLMs and has been a source and a trusted source, and that's pulling through to rank some of my competitors on let's say a listicle, and I'm not on that listicle, I'm reaching out to that journalist and saying, look, you've got this listicle. By the way, here's our USPs, here's why we, I believe that we are better than them. Here's some case studies, here's some awards that we've won, here's some recent testimonials. This is who we are, this is what we do. If I was to pay you a compensation to then go and do, update the article. That's the weight height, yeah. Then would you be willing to add my brand on there? Ideally, position number one, because I'm proving to you why we are better. I've got the data, I've got the surveys. Also, by the way, Mr. Journalist, if you update your article, it's freshness of content, and we will share this through to all of our social media platform. So it's going to get an influx of new traffic back to your great article of what you've just written. And that's what I've got a link in, certainly. And what if you say, fuck off? Then I'd reach out to the next person.
Craig Campbell: Just rinse and repeat?
James Dooley: Rinse and repeat, I would, yeah. I think there's obviously other places out there like insert.link.
Craig Campbell: Yeah, yeah, great, great, yeah, great, yeah. I don't consider that to be the same thing as a niche edit. Absolutely not. A niche edit for me is the old SAIP and all that stuff. So there are hacked ones, and insert links cost you more money. I don't consider them to be niche edits. So that's just my own personal belief. You can call them whatever you want. So what about, you mentioned before Age Demands, and you said using it as a three-on-one method, but then you did search on PBN.
James Dooley: Yeah. What's your thoughts on PBN links nowadays? People used to love PBN links. Are you still a fan of that homepage power of having a PBN link?
Craig Campbell: Absolutely. I think you can buy, you can go and get the insert.links, you can go and get this, you can do the PR, you can smooze people, you can bribe people, you can force them by going, I'm going to share all your shit in my fucking socials. And they're going, oh, that's fucking attractive. You know, he's got a big following or whatever. They're going to fall for all that crap. What can I do that's different to you that you can't get your grubby paws on? And that is where PBNs come in. I want something you can't fucking get through your bribery or your, you know, whatever you call that. I can't remember what word you use for the, you know, compensation, compensation. Something that you can't, you know, flutter a few quid about and get your dirty hands on. And that would be building my own PBN. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say, go build out fucking 1,000 PBNs or whatever. I think PBNs is just like the ice on top of the cake again, where I've got something you can't, and that might be the difference between me and you winning. And if you can't beat me, you're going to have to then build your own PBN and get your own assets as well. So it's always a bit trying to get something that you can't get, because that could be the deciding thing. And, you know, like I say, I know what you do. You know what I do. If we really wanted to compete with each other, we could go toe to toe, and it would probably be like up, down, up, down, up, down. But it's going to come upon where I'm going, how the fuck can I hold him down in position two? You know, and for me, PBNs are a great way to be able to implement that. So I'm a big fan, always have been. And even now, I'm still a massive fan of it.
James Dooley: Yeah, for me, with regards to different link building services and the benefits, another great one for some of the bigger brands is Digitopia. So actually going and getting, and so many people don't do it, because it might be five, six, $7,000 for a campaign. It's not cheap. You might only get 10 links. So it might be like $700 for a link that's put on there. But they are on very, very high authoritative, trusted websites that do move the needle. And some people are like, yeah, but they're nofollow. I'm like, I want them nofollow hints on them big sites. Like if I can get dofollow as well, happy days. But I'm really happy with getting those Digitopia links. They do pass the trust and the branded signals. And I think Digitopia is another great link building strategy. Yeah.
Craig Campbell: Absolutely. Another link building strategy for me is something I would do as well. You might not call it a link building strategy, but I'm going to throw it to you anyway. Parasite SEO, obviously your job is to leverage I don't know, Reddit or whatever it's going to be to obviously drive traffic to your website. But I would also see that as getting links on some of these platforms as well. Whether they're dofollow or nofollow or whatever, I'm not giving a fuck. I want links on some of those higher profile parasites as well, purely from a link juice. Because nofollow doesn't mean no equity at all. And if you're getting traffic from a Reddit and it's from a nice big VR, whatever it's going to be, I still think there's massive value in that as well. So I would also say Parasite is something I would be implementing into my strategy overall as well. Again, just to get a bit more juice and that traffic's flowing through that as well. So there's got to be some kind of benefit as far as I'm concerned from doing Parasite SEO from a link building perspective.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I think for me, the next one would be, and I know which one you're going to follow on to after this. We've asked the syndication of links, is podcasting links. So I can go and create a podcast. We're going to syndicate out to 47 different platforms. That includes places like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music. These are all really trusted sites that are hard to get on unless you've got a podcast. You also link and create an IMDb profile and you can then create the distribution company and have a do follow link from IMDb, which is another really, really trusted site. So the podcasting circuit links, I think is also great from a syndication point of view as well to repeat who you are, what you do. Mind-freaking-awesome. But obviously I'm presuming with regards to syndication, you're probably going to say, what's your thoughts on press releases?
Craig Campbell: Again, I wouldn't say they're a massive, massive needle mover as such, but it's still part of the job. It's going to help get things indexed. It's going to get brand mentions. There's so many other benefits to doing press releases, and feeding LLMs doing those press releases over and above the link power and the equity that come from them, because we all know deep down as SEOs, a lot of those syndicated press releases, there's hundreds of thousands of links on those websites. The actual link power that you're getting from it's decreasing all the time. But obviously the press release guys are always trying to add new networks to sites and all that kind of stuff as well. But yeah, I think press releases are a massive thing. And I certainly know from, I know you deal with Madge or have dealt with them and I'm in the Randy camp, not that I'm against Madge, Madge is a great guy as well. But these guys are also doing the AI podcast distribution from a link building perspective as well, and releasing the press release as a kind of AI podcast to then do all of that stuff. So they're kind of tying shit like that together as well, which again, getting on some of the bigger podcasting platform, they're just seeing link equity and syndication and more bang for your buck essentially, because they need to stay ahead of the curve. So I think there's still massive amounts of benefits to doing press releases, including any kind of small link equity you're going to get from it. But I think just as part of an overall link building trust, brand building and everything else, it's something else as well.
James Dooley: I think for me, the reason why I like Madge from Magic PR for the team, right, is that if one of my teams submit a press release and it's not to the standards that I want, they will come, they'll come back and say, whoa, you're not leveraging the power enough. So they basically turn around and say, where's the image? Cause also the press release can rank images. Where's the video embed? Where's the map embed? Where's the nap listing? So there's all these bits on top of just powering up the website of like image ranking, video ranking, map, like business profile ranking of what it can bring. And that's the reason why I'm like, okay, he's on the ball with it. I like the idea that it's almost like quality control of what it can bring back. But let me fire a few different quick fire questions to you because there's now lots of different other types of links, but now we go in towards maybe the dregs of, is it worth it? Is it not worth it? So blog comments, would you do it or not? Like, let's say there's a five a gig and you can all buy 20 blog comments. Would you do it or not?
Craig Campbell: Yeah, you would. Why would you do that? Because I get laughed at it before I remember doing it. I think in terms of indexation and everything else and how the internet works, it's massive from that. But is there value there? I think there is, you know, if you get one in Neil Patel's website and see you got a monster of a website, absolutely. Or whatever it may be. But I think I've always kind of felt that blog comments were more of a kind of indexation forcing thing. And if you understand how the internet works, that's a big part of everything that we do. So if you can retain stuff in the index, because we all know, you know, people are using indexing tools and everything else. You can go do some blog comments to make sure that maybe you don't have to do the indexing tool all the time. And you know, you're just spreading your wrist slightly. I've always done blog commenting for that. And I remember a few years ago, I spoke about it at a conference and some douchebag was putting stuff out on Facebook going, what fucking planets are you on? Blog comments fucking died in 2008 or whatever. And I'm like, arguably, you're right from that perspective. But you clearly don't know how the internet works. I want my shit indexed, that's why I'm using it. And what's interesting is that I wasn't certain what you were going to answer to that. I thought you was going to say yes, but if you was going to say no, I was then going to follow on, right? We did a lot of testing on it, literally six weeks ago on blog comments. We was very, very intrigued that 40% of the blog comments of what we force index got cited in the AI overviews. Where we did some anti-triples within it, stuff like that, but in the AI overviews, not only did it get cited in Claude, it was also cited in Gemini. So with the right questions or with the right answers and stuff of what's going in there, it was actually being picked up by the LLMs, which was like, well, there is other means of not even page rank distribution. You have your LLM seeding or LLM manipulation and getting the brand out there and getting information about what's going on. So the next one would be Wikipedia. Now I'm all about creating a Wikipedia page, you need to have a big brand for it, but if you could get a citation as a reference at the bottom, it's a nofollow link, would you be wanting, if you've got a reliable source for that as a link building site, would you be wanting Wikipedia citations?
James Dooley: Absolutely, it's a monster of a website, so I would absolutely take it all day long. Let's move on to the next one, Web 2.0. So you can go and get some blog spot or medium and all those, and certain people can, on certain platforms like Legit or Fiverr or Freelancer, there's certain places that says, okay, we will create you an article on this Web 2.0 for a dollar. Would you be interested in those type of links?
Craig Campbell: Absolutely, not just from a link equity point of view, but brand protection and making sure that someone else can't use my name. I'm thinking of that first and foremost, more than I would be thinking of what link just to get from, but absolutely. Which is also on that is what's quite interesting is the including the image, including the video, including that, so it's just, even there's not that much power, it's just repeating who you are and what you do to build that trust, confidence, and clarity, which I do think is key. Is there any other types of links, or let's have a little bit of it. With regards to trying to diversify your backlink profile, do you want only do follow links because they're passing the page rank distribution and the link juice? Are you wanting the foundational links, you've got some naked URLs, that you want some no follows, some do follows, like you want the mixture of what's in there. And with anchor text, are you wanting to blend that up with regards to naked URLs, branded, money rich, like what's your kind of goal to strategy on that?
James Dooley: I think you want to mix it up so that it looks natural as fuck. You know, that's the bottom line. And you know, how are you going to do that? That's why you're going to mix it all up. And no one's got 99.9% do follow backlink for them. No one has, you know, it's just not natural to have that. So do I care about follow or no follow? Of course I do care, you know, I think do follow is better than a no follow if you can get it. But you know, when you're doing your PR campaigns and stuff and stuff like that, it's not something you can manipulate or control. So if it's no follow from the sun, am I going to say no to it? Of course I'm fucking not. So I think, you know, you're always just trying to make sure that it's not spammy. It looks natural and it's done in the best way possible. So I don't want to stay, you know, 25% this and 25% because people do that shit all the time. And you know, there's a lot weighted on the brand, but obviously you get partial match, you know, target keywords specifically, which is obviously a very, very small amount and stuff like that as well. But yeah, I always want to make sure it just looks natural and holistic as you possibly can. And that's my way to do it. There's no exact figures.
Craig Campbell: I completely agree with you. Like I said, just try and make it look as natural as possible, including the link velocity as well. So consistently trying to do, not just slamming a thousand links on a day and then that's it done. And if anything, you're getting link loss. You're consistently trying to move that link. One question though.
James Dooley: Go on.
Craig Campbell: When you talk about anchor text, we've only got a couple of minutes left, right? When you talk about anchor text, what I also like is not deliberate in my part, but my anchor text gets mixed up for me. Is Craig Campbell gay and stuff like that? Do you know anything about that?
James Dooley: I know nothing about that. I just thought I'd ask. So I don't even need to make it look natural. People are doing it for me apparently and out of the goodness of their own heart. So I can't complain. I might have to, if that gets some search, I might have to write about it and do some blog posts. So, but yeah, we've obviously had a few battles, fucking around with people's names and is Craig better than Dooley or does Craig have a bigger dick than Dooley or whatever has happened. So I think that's also fun as well. So it just keeps it all looking, I'm getting trolled in my anchor text as well. So that makes it look really natural. So, yeah. So anyone who's watching this, what other link building services or strategies do you think we might have missed off? We really touched upon too much about like the powering up or bring viability and stuff like that to what type of links would we do? We'll do that on a follow-up. Make sure you check out the link in the description. Craig, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, mate.
Craig Campbell: Cheers, mate.