Most link building strategies have a dirty secret: they're built on one or two link types and dressed up to look like a plan.
Guest posts. Maybe a few citations. Rinse, repeat.
The problem isn't that those links are bad, It's that relying on them exclusively leaves your backlink profile brittle. A single algorithm update, a manual review, or a competitor who's actually thought this through can undo years of work. A real link building strategy covers all the bases. We’ve identified six distinct types of links that make up a complete, high-performing backlink profile and we build all six.
1. Foundational & Industry Links
These are your baseline: citations, directory profiles, and industry-specific listings. Not glamorous, but non-negotiable. Foundational links tell search engines you're a legitimate business operating in a real category. Skip them and you're building everything else on an unstable foundation. Every serious campaign starts here.
2. News Links
A genuine placement in a legitimate news outlet is one of the most valuable links your domain can earn. Not a press release blasted to syndication networks. Not a "media mention" on a site that launched last week. A real link from a real publication.
These are hard to get. That's the point. The difficulty is exactly what makes them valuable, and it's why most agencies don't bother.
Earned media links are attached to your reputation, not just your domain. They come from blogs, news outlets, and other publishers who reference your brand, content, or expertise because you've actually done something worth referencing. Unlike news links, they can come from a wide variety of sources.
These links matter increasingly in an AI-driven search landscape. AI systems use earned media signals to determine who's credible and who's not. Getting these right now pays dividends as search continues to evolve.
Editorial links are the workhorses of a link building campaign. Placed within relevant third-party content, they push authority into your mid- and lower-funnel pages and product pages, landing pages, the URLs where rankings translate directly into revenue.
These pages rarely earn links naturally, but they're often the most commercially important pages on your site. Editorial links bridge that gap. They accelerate domain growth and produce the kind of consistent ranking movement that shows up in your monthly reports.
5. Expert Links
These cannot be faked, bought, or outsourced to a team of outreach specialists running templates. Expert links are citations and references that high-authority, selective websites grant only to organizations they genuinely consider credible in their space.
They're earned by being good at what you do — which is inconvenient, but also a competitive advantage. Your competitors can't manufacture them. Neither can any AI tool or offshore link farm. The signals expert links deliver are among the most valuable in search.
6. Unique High Authority Links
These are the links that keep competitors up at night. Unusual, buried, fiercely difficult to identify, and essentially impossible to replicate at scale — these placements come from the kind of research that most agencies simply aren't willing to do.
This is what Page One Power was built on when we started in 2010. Our in-house research team still specializes in finding these opportunities. They round out your profile in ways that are nearly impossible to reverse-engineer.
Read more about it here.
Or if you just want to know which types your profile is missing, we'd be glad to take a look.
