Good link building is tedious. That is normally the honest answer. Rob Bonham found the exception, and it was sitting inside his client’s accounts payable.
Rob has spent over two decades in SEO, more than half of it inside agencies, across local, e-commerce, SaaS and home services. When I asked him where the red lines are in link acquisition, he skipped the vendor question entirely and told me about a maintenance, repair and operations parts supplier.
The supplier link nobody asks for
The client was e-commerce, carried hundreds of brands, and sold to hotels and apartment complexes rather than the public. Every one of those brands had a store locator or a where-to-buy page.
“one thing that I’ve seen work quite a bit in in links is is getting links from like legitimate partners that that that you work with… And it worked tremendously well and it was very easy. Typically, good link building is is not very easy. It’s it’s tedious, it requires a lot of outreach.”
— Rob Bonham, on Unscripted SEO
His description of the pitch is the reason it converts:
“We’re not paying for these links. We’re we’re not we’re not twisting their arm. We’re just saying, hey, you know, we we have something that’s gonna be important to your business. You might want to use us so we can, you know, kinda kinda help each other grow.”
— Rob Bonham
He called it shooting fish in a barrel. That is a rare sentence in link building and the whole reason this post exists.
Make the list before you make the pitch
Every business already sits inside a web of commercial relationships that nobody has ever mapped for link purposes. Go and write them down:
- Suppliers and manufacturers whose products you stock, install or resell. Where-to-buy pages, dealer locators, authorised installer directories.
- Software and platforms you pay for. Most have a customer story programme nobody applies to.
- Trade bodies, chambers and associations where you already pay dues and have never claimed the profile.
- Subcontractors and referral partners in both directions.
- Sponsorships, charities and events you already funded. Rob’s question about a donation is the one that stings: “did you did you even get a press release out about it?”
None of that is outreach. It is an audit of things you have already paid for.
The reason cold outreach stopped converting
Christopher Gimmer bootstrapped Snappa and now runs Goodmetrics. He does not think the tactic got worse. He thinks the channel got full:
“it’s it’s hard to do kind of traditional link building now just because like everyone’s inboxes are full of spam and stuff like that. And so I think people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus a yet another you know, blog post with you know, a wall of text.”
— Christopher Gimmer, on Unscripted SEO
That is a build instruction disguised as an observation. A calculator, a checker, a real dataset, a free tier — those earn links from people you never emailed. Christopher’s own free stock photo site is what launched a paid product.
What agencies are actually still doing
Jason Berkowitz founded Break The Web and has been doing SEO since 2010. Asked what still works when top-of-funnel traffic is down, his answer named the off-page work explicitly:
“Good off-page SEO, digital PR, link building, having good first-party data that journalists will eat up, connecting with other publications that maybe have content gaps, whatever it is. It’s still working. It’s still working well.”
— Jason Berkowitz, on Unscripted SEO
First-party data is the operative phrase. A journalist does not need your opinion. They need a number that only you have, which is a different production problem from writing another guest post.
Where the mention is now worth as much as the link
Rob’s current priority is not a link at all:
“the biggest thing right now… is you know the like unlinked mentions, getting b you know, visibility on on other third party publications and marketplace sites is more important than ever.”
— Rob Bonham
His example is a search for the best plumber nearby, where the answer gets assembled from listings scattered across the web: “It’s gonna look at Yelp. It’s gonna look at you know, maybe you know, like a home advisor or you know, other other places where that plumber might have listings across the web.” His conclusion, which applies well beyond local: “whoever has you know the bigger footprint and the more people talking about them across the web in a positive way.”
The order of operations
If you have a limited number of hours this month, spend them in this order: relationships you already have, assets worth linking to, data worth citing, then everything else. Cold email is last because it is where everyone else already is.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More at Link Building Ideas and Unscripted SEO.