Building authority through high-quality backlinks remains a cornerstone of SEO. In this live podcast, we’ll talk about “safe” link building – ethical techniques that comply with search engine guidelines. We’ll focus on building relevance, authority, and fostering natural link growth, so you can boost your rankings without risking a Google penalty, and cover strategies focused on earning links the right way.
Joining us to talk all things Safe Link Building was Amit Raj, Bibi Raven, Lilit Ayvazyan, Elizaveta Shutova, and Alexandra Tachalova
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Transcript
David Bain
Hello and welcome to the March 2026 edition of the Majestic SEO Panel discussing what safe link building means for SEO in 2026.
I’m your host David Bain, and joining me today are five great guests, so let’s meet them starting off with Amit.
Amit Raj
I am Amit Raj from The Links Guy. I’m based in Scotland.
David Bain
Amit, thanks so much for joining and also with us today is Lilit.
Lilit Ayvazyan
Hi. I’m Lilit. I work as an SEO Growth and Outreach specialist in the web3 space.
David Bain
Thank you for joining. And Alex is also with us.
Alexandra Tachalova
Hey, I’m Alex and I’m based in the Netherlands. I’ve been doing link building almost all my life.
David Bain
Okay. Also with us today is Bibi.
Bibi Raven
Hi I’m Bibi and online I go by Bibi the Link Builder.
David Bain
And also with us today is Eliza.
Elizaveta Shutova
Yeah, hi. So my full name is Elizaveta, and I’m the Head of Marketing at Serpzilla. This is a building platform and building marketplace. So previously I worked at Semrush and led performance marketing for PPC toolkit.
I think I’ve been doing SEO for about 10 years, so I’m really passionate about it too, and I’m happy to join the conversation.
David Bain
So let’s start by asking everyone the same question: what does safe link building actually mean in 2026? Amit, shall we start off with you?
Amit Raj
Yeah. So safe link building, to me, I think, as lot of people would say, it’s partly about the tactics that you’re using. I think it is also, it is partly to do with that. It’s also about control and judgment. Because I think, especially now, as we can see, AI is coming into a lot of SEO tasks, and it’s, I guess, infiltrating every part of SEO with its link building or even content. But I think the real skill is in knowing which links are actually going to change outcomes.
There’s a lot of conversation about Digital PR guest posting, or should you pay for links? Or should you not? There’ll be interesting conversations about the paying for links thing, but I’ve got theories on that. But I think, I think it’s not actually about paid or not paid thing. I think there’s like wider things to that that people have to consider first.
We’ll probably go into this deeper, but Safe Link Building is things like, would this link exist without manipulation? Is this something that’s been – and again, we’ll probably go into that later – does the content really belong on that site? Is it relevant? Is the topical alignment, does that site follow certain editorial decision making when it comes to the content, because that affects the quality of the link? So it’s multifaceted.
I don’t know if that answers your question, David, but yeah, there’s it’s partly to do with tactics, and also these other things, like how you control the process and your judgment when it comes to what type of links you should be building.
David Bain
We’ll come to Alex next. Alex, what’s your opinion on what safe link building actually means in 2026?
Alexandra Tachalova
I think nowadays, the link building market is very chaotic. It’s kind of full of scammers, banners, liars, and that type of people that you normally want to avoid, but since you’re hungry for links, you will go to them.
So I think the safest one will be the organic link building, which is everyone is talking about, but no one knows how to deliver, right? This is like kind of a Pandora Box. Everyone is kind of wishing to have a dreaming about it, but rarely someone really has this knowledge and understanding. But, you know. One more time. There is no kind of 100% organic one, because you certainly manipulate journalists, right? To take your, you know, story and to publish it, because you manipulate it in the way that you create the story that they would love, right? It’s not a random story, right? Out of the blue, you create the story that they would love to see life because they’re hungry for the right news, actually, to kind of write to please their audience, and they’re hungry for money.
But I would say, like something in between, like, you know, certain level of manipulations, but the one that are making sense. So you do link insertions, you do paid link building, but you know, in the relevant context, you by guest post one more time on good websites, whenever you can do that. And nowadays it’s possible. There are a lot of marketplaces, right? Where you can do it safely, by the way, I think, within the current state of market. And this is very, very interesting, but we can talk about this later on, because it was like for ages. It was something that everyone was like, kind of saying, this is ‘no-go’. And now it’s blooming. You know, if you go to brightonSEO, like 30% of their sponsor some marketplaces where you can buy a link.
We live in a very interesting time when, you know, a lot of things that used to be no-go, that used to be most probably considered as black hat, nowadays purely white hat. So, yeah, I guess it’s more about high level strategy, rather than what you do exactly, right. You need to have something high level, and then you can do it right.
David Bain
Lilit, what does safe link building mean in 2026 to you?
Lilit Ayvazyan
So to continue what we discussed already, in my opinion, in 2026 safe link building is no longer about placing as many links as possible. The focus has shifted toward real user acquisition and contextual visibility. Instead of traditional link building, the goal is to appear in relevant places where users actually discover products with the right context, visuals, sometimes images and recommendation, a link by itself, has little value if it doesn’t bring real users.
One effective strategy is being the number one mentioned in high quality listicles. However, these articles should be written by credible first parties, not by the brand itself. The logic is simple. Trust comes from independent recommendation, not self promotion.
Research is also becoming more precise, it’s important to carefully choose where your brand should appear. Beyond traditional SEO tools like we use Ahrefs, Semrush and Majestic as well. I also use PromptRush SEO analytics tools for the AI era that track how often a brand appears in answers generated by AI systems like GPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Traditional SEO track your ranking on Google. This tool tracks whether AI tools mention your brand in their answers.
David Bain
Eliza, Lilit said that a link provides no real value if it doesn’t bring users as well. And you were nodding away to that. Do you agree with that, and also, what is your definition of safe link building in 2026?
Elizaveta Shutova
I really agree with the all the points that we have discussed, because the thing that I would like to also add is that search engines right now are very good at spotting some unnatural patterns so we need really to focus on diversity, topical relevance. This is where we are placing backlinks are vetted, and how the structure of backlink also profile compile, compares to your competitors, because it’s really relevant, because you can, for example, have more than 100 backlinks, but if they are not, if they do not have the same structure as your competitors, you will not just get organic traffic, so you will lose at the end.
I also think the nice thing is to talk about topical authority, because it’s really matters today, if we are thinking about Google mobile update and also rise of AI SEO. It’s really important to have backlinks that like support your topic, that are niche relevant. So when links support your topic, it builds a strong SEO signal so that we ascend in to search engines. And I think that’s really ethical right now.
David Bain
Brilliant, okay, and let’s move on to Bibi with that first question. So Bibi, what does safe link building in 2026 mean to you?
Bibi Raven
Link Building is only in a very specialized segment, right? So I don’t know about all the different types of links, but a lot of clients I work with, they use a lot of different backlink vendors, and what I see there is that it’s actually okay to use some links that some people would see as shady or spammy. It just really depends on the niche you’re in.
The danger is when you really hyper focus on one tactic, and you scale it and you automate it, and I think that’s where you can really miss opportunities. So that’s not safe, but you can also mess yourself up, because if, for some reason, that link, that type of link, gets ignored, then you lose all the investment that you did, and you lose all the ranking and traffic.
So keep trying out different things, and have an open mind as well. Because if you bank on one, if you bet on one horse, that’s really, really tricky. And if you’re obsessed with scaling, you know, at some point the links don’t make sense anymore. You lose your common sense, and you only want DR 90, and you want 1,000s of these links, and then suddenly you lose all of it. So you have to find a balance between quality what makes sense, but also look at your competitor, see what they’re doing, because some of the links that you might not like, they’re actually working, but be don’t be so narrow minded.
The other thing is that doesn’t have to do with safe or unsafe, but more with if you’re so focused on links, but you’re not focused on maybe somebody becoming an affiliate or a business becoming a partner or an influencer you can work with, or somebody you just want to build goodwill with, that in long term, can turn into something else. If you just focus on links alone, that then you miss a lot of a lot of opportunities.
David Bain
Lilit obviously mentioned that she didn’t believe that links were valuable if they didn’t drive any traffic. So the question is, for everyone quickly, just a yes or a no answer, if that’s okay, can it be worthwhile to build a link that doesn’t drive any traffic? Amit? What’s your answer to that?
Amit Raj
In theory, you want every link.
But if you want every link to drive traffic, the question just is, how do you track that? Because, as we know, attribution is becoming really difficult. Obviously, there’s a lot of things you can do in terms of tracking prompts, but I think yeah, in an ideal scenario you would, but my, I think you get bogged down with trying to track everything.
David Bain
Lilit, so obviously we know your answer is yes, you want every single link that you build to drive traffic?
Lilit Ayvazyan
No, let’s correct that not every link. Of course, SEO toward visibility in AI generated results where the goal isn’t just links, but being part of the source, when your product is in the place, recommending the products.
So I can finalize and say that the safe link building also require stronger internal collaboration with teams. SEO teams need to work closely with PR with brand and content teams to ensure that link building efforts are aligned with broader brand narratives, media placements and high quality content initiatives, this approach not only reduce risk, but also creates more natural, credible mentions across the web.
David Bain
Okay, let’s try and go for this yes or no answer here. Eliza, is it the case that you can build a link and it can be valuable without driving traffic?
Elizaveta Shutova
Yes, definitely, because we have another metric that we have missed, that is brand mentions. And brand mentions are really valuable because they are sending signals to ChatGPT, Perplexity and other LLMs. So I think it’s really great signal. And AI trust you because of that, and so we need as many backlinks from different sources that we can gain, for example, from forums, from, for example, Reddit, LinkedIn and other sources, because they are in the top 10. And like this, is a top 10 platforms that ChatGPT, Perplexity and other LLMs pull the information from.
So I think yes, both backlinks that drive traffic and brand mentions, they are both valuable right now.
David Bain
Bibi, your turn. Is it worthwhile building links that don’t drive traffic?
Bibi Raven
I think it’s okay to have not every link is optimal, but you also have links that are, for instance, in like Lilit said, in listicles or in directories or other places, or your Google profile or whatever, or maybe they’re on social or you get mentioned somewhere, or PR thing that all counts towards something to visibility of your brand.
So I wouldn’t calculate the value of each link by how much traffic it brings, because I think it all adds up. And let’s say you have a link on a really strong domain, like, like a really high brand, strong domain, but it’s very broad domain. Then you want to do an article that’s very relevant to your target page, but it might not, it might not bring traffic in, but it can still help you, help your domain, and help you be more relevant around that topic.
Lilit Ayvazyan
The real goal is user acquisition.
Alexandra Tachalova
Ideally, yes, if you’re a partnership manager or, you know, you’re an affiliate manager, but I think in the link building world, it’s a little bit different.
And I have two examples that will illustrate perfectly my perspective. So the first example will be listicles, by the way, and actually they don’t bring profit, because if you, if you know the list, what are the listicle blogs say the best 100 link building tools. Do you think users will be clicking through each and every link there?
Lilit Ayvazyan
If listicle only number one. Sorry, if we want link from listicle, it should be only from number one mention.
Alexandra Tachalova
You mean you should be listed only on the first position?
Lilit Ayvazyan
Yeah, yeah.
Alexandra Tachalova
I strongly disagree. LLM models, they crawl the page, and they look at the structure of the page rather than where you are listed. So basically, how to manipulate LLMs. Here’s a short session on manipulating LLM models if you want to do so. So how to manipulate LLM models if you want to appear as the top two? It’s kind of like, you know, the user is asking, ‘what is the best three SEO tools,’ right? And you know you want to be there.
So you take all the listicle posts that exists, that exist on the web, right? And your goal to feature your tool across all those listicle posts, as many as possible and but not just putting your tool. You should follow the structure, which means, if the page has the structure of the number of the tool, the headline of the tool, then some information them, some screenshots, pros and cons.
You have to follow this because LLM models, what they do, they kind of compare the elements of the page, how it structure it, and whenever your tool is not written in the same format, then they kind of not give you enough credibility. So they are kind of excluding you, right? And that is very much it.
By the way, you can also move a little bit forward with that. And you can also create guest posts, right? That will be also listicles that you will furthermore build links to. And then you can change the, basically the top page that are appearing in AI overviews of Google.
But what I wanted to tell this is, like, kind of listicle post, right? And normally they don’t bring traffic, but they’re quite valuable nowadays, because, you know, one more time you’re manipulating LLM models, straight away, injection and the other thing is Digital PR, because I kind of do digital, therefore, I’ve been doing it for a few years. I know how to put my clients on USA Today, on BBC. You know any, any, literally any media that comes to your mind and organically. But the thing with those stories that they are not really coming after the commercial side of my of my clients.
So I have, for instance, the client that is selling tours to climb Kilimanjaro. But I can’t really create the story about climbing Kilimanjaro, per se. I have to be way more creative, because journalists are not looking for the commercial angle. They wanted something juicy, interesting, data driven. So for instance, if I want to go and feature them in the US media outlets. I need to create a story about the US market, to be precise, and then they get actually traffic from, you know, BBC, Forbes, Business, Insider, USA Today, and you just go, it’s like more than 100 sites.
But this traffic is not targeted. People are kind of curious to know who actually created this story, rather than they really want to take and, you know, they want to buy something from them. Well, there is, like an overlap of the audience, of course, but it’s not that big, and the traffic is not that important in this situation, while they are really generating it.
David Bain
I want to go back to the subject of marketplaces, tell me about this trend towards marketplaces, and whether it’s something that SEOs should embrace, or whether there are better ways to build links in 26?
Elizaveta Shutova
So there are, like, as you know, many ways to build backlinks. And I feel marketplaces is a really good way. I know that could sound a bit cheesy, because I represent the marketplace, but still you have.
A lot of clients who really enjoy the way of gaining backlinks, because, firstly, you have control. So for example, in our marketplace, we have all the 14 metrics to choose. So we pull data from Ahrefs, from Semrush. We are official partners with Semrush, and so like our clients can find like special metrics to choose. So for example, they need, for example, topic, I know, for example, automotive. They need something like DR 20 plus. They need some real traffic, traffic from 1000 they want to choose, for example, language: English, Spanish or whatever.
After that, they have a specific list, and they have control over these placements because marketplace, but also they give is the guarantee so that you will post this link, and we will know for sure that it will last more than one month or one year. And if you are like, go in with like other companies, or go directly to some media, you will not have this guarantee. So I feel there are many advantages to this approach, and some people really enjoy it, it’s like a fast gateway to gain backlinks.
David Bain
Who would like to jump in next?
Alexandra Tachalova
Well, I quite like my marketplaces. Basically it is like a middleman hero, taking some commission, making sure that the deal will go live. And then, if you are not a well known too, if you are not a well known persona, then it’s so easy to get the link there, right? With certain guarantees without breaking your back without because at the end of the day, you go in the same direction. You will go in through, you know, spreadsheets, spammers and blah, blah, blah, if you want to cut the corners, if you want to your link to be live, I don’t really know, in two weeks or something, right? If you want to do it right, then you will spend two years building relationship with the site team, and eventually you get there. But everyone wants the results right now, right?
So what’s the point of going through 3-rd party guys? I mean, I’m not against them one more time, but it’s just going to, you know, you’re going to lose a lot of nerves. Your nerve cells will be in a complete mess, right? Or you have an option of just going to a lovely website with a nice interface, click, click, and you’re done, right? And then you know, if the link is not live, they will return your money back.
So this is my perspective, right? It’s like one more time. It’s your own choice. I’m not really promoting this, right? The ethical side of things still exist, right? It’s your own choice. How you want to make things. But if we think it from a business perspective, what is rational? What is your, you know, time risk, what are your time resources? How much you want to spend and so on. Then it makes complete sense. This is my perspective.
David Bain
Let’s go back to Amit for a second and change the subject slightly and introduce AI more. So Amit, what impact is AI having on safe link building in 2026?
Amit Raj
I mean, two, probably two main areas. One is obviously AI is kind of eating a lot of our traffic, as you can see through AI overviews, mainly. So, I think to some extent, but that ties in with stuff we’ve already talked about, about the type of links that you want to build, or you want to get brand mentions, you want to be in listicles, that kind of thing. So I think it’s affecting whether it’s safe or unsafe. I don’t know. I think it affects whether those links are even worth doing, because I guess things can be unsafe in terms of you could be doing tactics that give you links, but it’s not worth spending that time, or it’s not worth spending that money. So there’s that. I think that’s one side to it.
The other thing is, AI does help is in terms of automation. And we’ve all seen the amount of automation you can do with AI. You can do things much quicker. I think within link building, there’s obviously use cases for it. I mean, I’ve seen people automate like 70, 80% of the link building process with AI there is you can really compress the amount of the manual work. A lot of it is eliminated.
At the same time, there’s a danger there, because I think when things become very quick and you can automate, and you can do things at speed, there’s a tendency. And we all people are trying to save money. Businesses don’t want to spend as much on marketing. They want to reduce the size of the team. There’s a danger. I think it comes unsafe when it is just like scale, scale, scale. Let’s automate, get as many links as we can.
Going back to listicles, I think listicles are a good tactic. I just think the scaled nature of some listicle building that some people are doing, not just on their own website. I just don’t know if some of the services doing listicle building at scale when they, you know, publish on other sites, how valuable that will be in the long term. I think in the short term, you can get value out of it. What will happen long term, I think we’ve still to see the end result of that.
David Bain
Amit, what’s your number one part of the link building process that you like to automate using AI? And what AI do you use and why?
Amit Raj
I mean, we’ve worked on a few automations, to be honest, we created one that used like or definitely categorizing websites. Obviously you would use AI for that. I think OpenAI is pretty good at that. Anthropic is good, but it’s API costs are expensive. And I think we use something where we had OpenAI do the categories, and then we use Gemini to cluster it, or might have been the other way around.
So I thought it was pretty good for that, and then for the contact finding, we were using AI to do, like a job title qualification thing. So let’s say it takes a website, because you know, when you reach out to a website you want to get a link, they’re not always going to have a content manager or an editor or whatever it might be something slightly different. So you can use AI to, like, determine what to take and then obviously, use an email finding API, like Hunter or Find Email. I would say I think they’re better than Hunter, actually, but so I would say that outreach, to some extent, I’ve seen people automate most of that.
You need to be careful with the outreach, because then you kind of end up with, like, very crappy emails, basically, if you automate the outreach, unless you segment emails. So yeah, I think like 70, 80% of it you can automate. But you, you know, it’s like giving somebody, it’s like giving somebody a chainsaw. You know, the chainsaw is not going to turn somebody into tree surgeon that can cut the tree perfectly in the right places. You know, I kind of see it like that. You need, it needs to be in the hands of the right person who knows what they’re doing.
David Bain
Great examples there. So thanks for those really specific examples there. Lilit, you were going to jump in there as well with an answer. So from your perspective, how is AI impacting link building?
Lilit Ayvazyan
I wanted to talk about outreach as well, because to have a good link, the important part is outreach. The tricky part is outreach. I can generate personalized outreach emails very quickly referee seeing specific pages and suggesting logical placements, but when everyone uses the same tools and prompts, the personalization starts looking identical. Editors start seeing the same patterns, the same complements, the same transactions, the same closing lines that creates footprint tricks.
Another really important use of AI is quality control. AI can analyze anchors, text, text distributions, detect over optimized anchors, flag irrelevant placements and monitor unnatural spikes in link and that’s important because search engines are also using AI to detect manipulative link patterns. So in many ways, there is an arms race, AI helping build links and AI helping detect them.
The safest model I see is a hybrid approach. Use AI heavily for research, prospecting and risk auditing, but keep the strategy, relationship building and final outreach human-led. AI can do the process, but good link building still depends on editorial value and human judgment. In my opinion.
David Bain
It’s interesting, really, that you mentioned that search engines are also using AI to detect manipulation in terms of link building. Obviously, you don’t want to be too aggressive. You don’t want to be going away from the norm in terms of the number of links that would naturally form towards a particular web page.
Eliza, again, you’re nodding away a little bit there as well. So I’ll give you the floor next. What are your thoughts in general by AI, and how it’s impacting link building, and any other thoughts in relation to what Lilit was sharing there?
Elizaveta Shutova
Yeah, so I think today, teams can use AI to analyze large numbers of websites where we put our backlinks, also to identify relevant prospects, personalized outreach. So the key here, I think, is balance, because AI should be used to improve our research, our targeting efficiency, but still, humans need to control. Need to see whether this backlink is relevant or not, and keep an eye on the overall strategy.
I think this is also where like backlink marketplaces can help, like with the control, because you can see, you can check the website before you buy backlinks, that you can evaluate this site, and in many cases, it provides guarantees, which also like reduce operational risk. So like together, when we combine AI and human other side, this gives us perfect combination to make SEO stronger and more efficient.
David Bain
Bibi. How is AI changing the way, if any way, that you do link building?
Bibi Raven
A lot of people mentioned stuff that I’ve played around with too, with AI and, like, they say you really need just like, yeah, like a chainsaw just ripping everything apart. But the problem for me is that I think it’s on the receiver’s end as well, right? Because I do a lot of outreach based link building, and I think email servers and inboxes and whatever the text that you want, it’s a link building email, even if you’re very creative and whatever. So it becomes really hard to get that email to the person. So that’s also why I changed my emails into not looking link builder-y, not even like a guest post page, but more like, hey, let’s work together. And the prospects are also companies. They’re not content only sites.
But that creates another problem, because then it’s a little bit vague of what I want from a person, and then I give them a lot of options, and it becomes a whole conversation, and I need the clients involved as well, so I’m still really trying to find the middle ground with that. And I use AI for that as well, you know, for if you have a really long thread of a conversation, I ask AI. So what’s the deal here? What’s the summary, and it helps me keep track of the conversation. I know it’s not really a normal way of using it, but that’s how I use it, just to keep me sane.
The other thing that I also noticed was Perplexity can be pretty good at coming up with link exchange proposals, because that’s the other thing that companies are sometimes interested in link exchanges instead of something else, and then, but then you need these little trigger words.
So I think Lilit said that a lot of people use the same prompts, and it’s true, you need to find these words that AI doesn’t associate with link building or with SEO even. So if I ask AI, ‘hey, can you come up with a subtle reference to a topic.’
Lilit Ayvazyan
The same compliments, right? The same compliments, you will get the same compliments.
Bibi Raven
Yeah, I never do compliments anyway, because that sounds, I try not to be insincere in the email, right? So it makes you sound very cheesy and fake. But if you, if you ask, ‘can you give a subtle reference to a certain topic on in an article?’ That’s how, if you use the word ‘subtle,’ that’s how AI triggers to give you another result. So it can give you a link exchange proposal. That’s not so obvious, because if you ask it, ‘hey, can you find a relevant link placement in this article,’ then it says, ‘yeah, it’s here find lawyers in New York’. And I’m like, ‘no, no, no, no. That’s too obvious.’ You know, we need something not overly salesy and commercial. So subtle is a really good one logical common sense. Not salesy all those. You need to find these little magic words that give you other results. So I don’t know, I started rambling. It was more like a tip than anything.
David Bain
Let’s finish off by asking everyone the same question, and that’s the importance of internal collaboration, because SEO needs to be ingrained with other marketing departments internally, normally in larger organizations and certainly within agencies, you’re working with other marketing channels as well.
So the final question is, how do you ensure greater internal collaboration when you’re link building to be more effective, more aligned with what you do?
And then we’ll ask everyone, just to remind the listener what your name is and where people can find you online.
So let’s go back with Amit: how do you ensure more integration, alignment with the activities that you’re doing, and then remind people where to find you, please?
Amit Raj
So I think obviously, with there being a broader off-page play here, I think whether it’s link building, listicles, digital PR, being on Reddit, whatever you’re going to eventually need some sort of internal collaboration. I mean, for example, when we worked with a client in like, the cyber security space, they really wanted us to get on certain types of websites. And yeah, to some extent, that worked.
But then, if there was, for instance, you want to get on a website like dark reading, let’s say cyber security magazine, they need an expert to be in the article. And if nobody from the company is willing to be on that, or to add any, you know, little bit of expert nuance in the article, or whatever, then, well, you’re not collaborating effectively.
So that’s like one specific example, but this is why it’s important. And maybe the content team need to make some linkable assets, because you know that’s going to naturally acquire links as well. And in fact, some of those links would be hard to get with, like proactive outreach, like sometimes when you naturally acquire links, you’ll get links that the other link builder wouldn’t be able to get, for instance.
Everybody’s got a part to play, whether it’s SEO, PR, somebody in the content team, maybe a subject matter expert, they’ve got some value to add. There could be somebody in the team, who can, I did see one guy doing, like, expert commentary. And then what their team did was they had, I think it was a doctor or a dentist, like, obviously, they’re quite busy. So what they were doing was they were dropping voice notes into a whatsapp channel, and then they were taking that, like, whenever he had time, and then they were using that as part of their expect commentary, which I thought was quite smart.
There’s, there’s different things you can do and leverage everybody’s skills within the team, but that’s hard, obviously, when you’re, if you’re an agency, I can understand, but you need to get buy in for these kind of things, because the end of the day, you need to get results.
David Bain
Where can people find you online?
Amit Raj
Yeah, so they can find me on TheLinksGuy.com and you can get me on LinkedIn, or sign up to my newsletter. I’ve got a weekly newsletter as well.
David Bain
Thanks so much. Lilit, what are your thoughts on working more effectively with other departments to make link building something that more people think of within an organization, and where can people find you as well?
Lilit Ayvazyan
To continue what Amit talked about, when SEO runs link building separately from PR, from brand and content, the messaging often becomes inconsistent as SEO might pursue links from sites that PR would never want the brand associated with. Content might produce assets that weren’t designed to attract links in the first place. PR might secure media coverage, but nobody optimized the placement for link equity and outreach emails sometimes use a tone that doesn’t match the brand voice, which editors immediately noticed in our days in 2026 link building works best when it’s aligned with the broader narrative the company is trying to build.
Instead of chasing a high volume of backlinks, the goal is to earn high value the same brand story across the web that requires collaboration between SEO, PR, content, brand and yes, this alignment also matters more in the era of AI search. AI systems also often rely on across multiple sources to validate information. So what other publications, experts and communities says about your brand becomes just as important as what you publish yourself.
When these teams work together, every mention reinforces the same signal, and that’s ultimately what makes link building safer for me, because the links aren’t isolated tactics. They are part of consistent narrative about the brand, about the company.
David Bain
Lilit, where can people find you online, please?
Lilit Ayvazyan
You can find me on LinkedIn.
David Bain
Okay, superb. Thank you so much for joining us today. Eliza, what are your thoughts on working more effectively with other marketing departments as a link builder, and where can people find you?
Elizaveta Shutova
So I feel like when SEO, PR, content teams so they work separately, backlinks, in this case, they are a bit disconnected from the actual brand story and brand narrative, and also it sends like really separated SEO signals to LLMs and to the search engines. So when these teams, like collaborate together, operate as one system, so links grow naturally, and it’s really good for AI SEO and for traditional SEO as well.
For example, a company might publish some research, some original data, and this becomes a strong linkable asset for PR team and also for link builders. So for example, PR can pitch this research to journalists, to some like media, big media outlets, while SEO teams or link builders, they can secure placements in some industry blogs, listicles and expert articles. So they collaborate together and they strengthen their like backlink profile in general.
So I think this collaboration can really help to grow backlink profile naturally and like, send really nice, strong SEO signals about the brand to search engines and to LLMs.
As for the second question, so people can find me on LinkedIn as well. I’m Elizaveta Shutova there, and also our website, Serpzilla.com. Yeah. Thank you so much.
David Bain
Thanks so much for joining us all. Bibi, what are your thoughts on the question and where people can find you?
Bibi Raven
I’ll just give two extra cents, I would, if I was a company, I would definitely invest in having an in-house link builder, even if you have no idea what you’re talking about. You know, just start a little bit with that. Use backlink vendors, but at the same time, build your own team.
I was also thinking back when I was a social media marketer at a big truck company that sold trucks worldwide, and I could stand up and give a presentation about social media, but that didn’t work, right? So what I did was I went to each salesperson, each had their own region, like one was Nigeria, the other was Venezuela, and the purchasing managers, and sit with them and learn from them what their department is about.
So I think if you hire a link builder in your company, they should sit with each department and just have a social talk, get to know what they’re doing, especially customer service, because I think there’s so much gold there, you know, especially for links and then, and then go from there.
So keep it in-house, and have that person be involved in every department, and also make clear for each departments how it can help them if they get more links, and how it can turn into money. Plus, there are a lot of departments that leave links on the table. So your IT department might work with a lot of suppliers. You can get links there, you know. So the person needs to talk to everybody, and it’s hard with remote work, of course, but you got to figure out how to do that.
So I will definitely go that way, because that’s how everything integrates. And then you’re not just in your little narrow street focusing on your links, but you learn from every different expertise how you can get links that your competitors don’t. So that’s what I would do.
David Bain
Lovely. Where can people find you, Bibi?
Bibi Raven
Oh yeah, here on BibiBuzz.com and you can find me on LinkedIn.
David Bain
Thank you. Alex, what are your thoughts? The final thoughts on how link building can be done more effectviely with other teams and where people can find you?
Alexandra Tachalova
If you want to do something meaningful in link building, you need to forget about link building. This is the first rule. This is the first rule people, people that claim themselves the best link builders, yeah, they’re the one that you don’t really want to meet, right? They’re the ones that’s spamming in my comments and so on.
So that is the first thing, because I think it’s not about things have changed a lot. It was like that 10 years ago, 20 years ago and so on. So things haven’t changed at all, but there are a lot of noise, right? Around link building, about the importance of links, about manipulations and so on. So for me, if tomorrow, right? I need to join a completely new company, and I need to do something on the link building side. What I would be choosing, right? I’d be doing a mixture of digital PR, but with the focus of one more time, not really to build links, but to do something meaningful, right? Interesting, thought proactive, like, you know, something that will actually create the interest around the brand. You know, help you build the audience. Help you build relationship with the key figures in your industry and so on.
And of course this will go to a broader audience, and I will do something for we’ll go just after influencers and potential partners. Because, I mean, when I used to be at Semrush, what we were doing mainly just building relationship with influencers, right? And that’s actually how Semrush succeeded. They had a few very big affiliate guys that were actually kind of promoting their service. And this guy, they were running cheap, tons of money, and Semrush was earning as well. So it was, like a very, very good cooperation, right?
And I think that is, you know, the best case scenario, because they will be actually promoting your brand, because they’re interested, you know, in getting more money. They are financially interested in helping your business. And like, you know, this kind of mutually beneficial connection they have, kind of they can build, also a lot of links. So links, per se, they are not the final goal.
The final goal is to make your business the number one. And then you think, okay, what I can do, right? What can I do to make this happen? So, yeah, that’s how would I approach things. And, of course, what the rest of other guys share there that is also tons of, you know, great insights there. So, you know, follow them guys too.
David Bain
Where can people find you?
Alexandra Tachalova
On LinkedIn. Yeah, that’s where I talk about different things.
David Bain
Thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve been your host. David Bain, you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO Panel.
If you want to join us live next time sign up at majestic.com/webinars and, of course, check out SEOin2026.com too.
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- Safe Link Building in 2026 - February 19, 2026
- How to Optimize for Google AI Mode - January 23, 2026
- Advanced Filters available across Site Explorer - January 19, 2026