Link Building Strategy: Why Link Producers and Association Producers Both Matter

A strong link building strategy is no longer simply a contest to collect the most referring domains. The more useful question is whether each activity creates a link quickly, builds lasting brand association, or ideally does both.

In the original Semrush video that inspired this framework, link-building work is divided into two practical groups: link producers and association producers. That distinction is valuable because it helps founders, marketers, and SEO teams avoid a familiar mistake: investing heavily in sophisticated PR campaigns before they have useful pages to promote, or spending years on easy-to-replicate outreach while competitors become the brands journalists, partners, and AI-driven search experiences recognize.

The core idea is simple. Link producers help a site earn a dependable flow of relevant backlinks. Association producers put the brand in meaningful contexts: cited alongside credible companies, named by experts, featured in original research, or connected to a category in places real audiences trust. Both have a role. The mix should change as the business and its website mature.

The two-part model for a modern link building strategy

The terminology may be new to some marketers, but the difference is intuitive once you see it.

Link producers are repeatable, accessible activities designed to uncover and win relatively straightforward backlink opportunities. Think competitor backlink research, unlinked-mention reclamation, resource-page outreach, broken-link building, and targeted email outreach. These tactics are generally easier to systemize and can give a young site its first credible external signals.

Association producers are harder to execute because they depend on having a genuinely worthwhile story, asset, relationship, or point of view. Examples include original data studies, digital PR, expert commentary for journalists, high-value guest contributions, co-marketing campaigns, and partner-led content. The outcome is not merely a URL. It is a contextual association between your brand and a useful topic, category, customer problem, or respected publication.

That framing is especially timely. Google still says it uses links both to discover pages and as a signal for determining page relevance. But Google’s ranking systems operate at the page level using multiple signals, not a single backlink metric. In other words, links remain useful, but a simplistic “more domains equals better rankings” mindset is inadequate. Google’s public guidance also emphasizes helpful, reliable, people-first content rather than content created chiefly to manipulate rankings. (developers.google.com)

The practical implication is that a good link building strategy should evaluate more than link volume. It should consider relevance, editorial standards, placement, audience fit, referral potential, the destination page’s usefulness, and what the mention teaches people and systems about the company.

What link producers do well

Link producers are the operational backbone of many SEO programs. They work because the opportunity already exists: a page needs a better resource, an old reference is broken, a journalist has mentioned the company without linking, or a competitor’s successful content pattern reveals a gap you can fill.

Their main advantage is accessibility. A lean startup may not have a proprietary dataset, a PR agency, or a recognizable founder. It can still publish a genuinely helpful guide, identify websites that list useful resources, and make a concise case for inclusion.

Common link-producer tactics

The original video highlights several useful examples:

• Competitor backlink analysis: Study which pages on competing sites attract referring domains, what formats earn those links, and which publishers repeatedly cover the topic.
• Resource-page outreach: Find maintained lists of tools, tutorials, directories, or references where your resource solves a clear need for the page’s audience.
• Broken-link building: Locate external pages linking to a dead resource, then offer a relevant live replacement.
• Lost-link and unlinked-mention reclamation: Recover links that disappeared after a site migration or ask publishers to turn a legitimate brand mention into a citation.
• Straightforward editorial outreach: Contact a small, selective list of relevant publishers when you have content that materially improves a page they already maintain.

Each tactic is based on a specific reason to contact the publisher. That matters. “We wrote a post and would love a link” creates work without providing value. “Your guide points readers to a 404 page; here is a current resource that covers the same subject with updated examples” gives an editor a concrete maintenance improvement.

Why these tactics suit new and low-authority sites

New sites need evidence that their content deserves attention, but they also need to be realistic about what they can win. A cold outreach pitch for a feature in a major national publication may fail if the company has no unique data, no news angle, and no recognized spokesperson. A pitch to a specialized resource list, community newsletter, association page, or niche blog may be far more achievable.

That does not make the resulting links automatically “low quality.” A relevant link from a maintained page read by the exact people you want to reach can drive qualified visitors, improve discovery, and create a relationship that leads to larger opportunities later.

For example, a small SaaS company offering a developer tool might begin by earning inclusion in carefully selected API, open-source, startup, and workflow-resource pages. Its target should not be every directory that accepts submissions. It should be placements where a developer could realistically compare tools, encounter the product, and use it.

The limitations of link producers

The downside is that link-producer work has a ceiling. The opportunity pool becomes less attractive as you exhaust the obvious pages. Competitor overlap lists often surface sites that already link to several rivals, while large-scale broken-link prospecting can consume enormous time for modest response rates.

More importantly, these activities can become detached from brand building. A generic checklist may earn a few links. But a credible annual industry benchmark, a widely used free calculator, or a strong perspective from a practitioner can give people a reason to remember, recommend, and search for the company.

That is where association producers enter the picture.

What association producers do differently

Association producers aim to create a durable connection between a brand and a topic. They may earn fewer placements in a given month than bulk outreach, but the best ones can generate editorial links, brand mentions, referral traffic, customer trust, and reusable content assets at once.

This category includes:

1. Linkable assets, such as original research, free tools, templates, benchmarks, calculators, and definitive guides.
2. Digital PR, where a company creates a newsworthy story and pitches it to publications with an audience that cares.
3. Expert-source programs, which help journalists and writers find credible, quotable specialists.
4. Strategic guest contributions, where an expert publishes original, audience-specific insight on a respected third-party platform.
5. Partner links and co-marketing, including integration directories, customer stories, ecosystem pages, webinars, joint research, and implementation guides.

The point is not to manufacture prestige. The point is to contribute something that a publisher, partner, or reader would reasonably want to reference even if Google did not exist.

The brand association advantage

An editorial mention on a respected industry publication can communicate much more than anchor text. It can tell readers that your company is relevant to a subject, credible enough to quote, and useful in a particular context. A partner integration page can reinforce what your product works with and who uses it. A data study can establish that your team understands a market problem at a deeper level than a competitor publishing interchangeable blog posts.

This does not mean every high-authority publication is a strategic win. A broad media mention that attracts the wrong audience and describes the product inaccurately can be less valuable than a niche placement that explains a specific use case perfectly. Context is the differentiator.

It is also important not to overstate how AI search systems work. No responsible SEO can promise that a single PR campaign will make a brand appear in AI-generated answers. Google says its AI search features remain grounded in its core ranking and quality systems, and its guidance is to continue following foundational SEO practices while creating valuable, non-commodity content. (developers.google.com)

Still, the direction is clear: being cited, discussed, and useful in credible places is strategically stronger than treating every backlink as interchangeable.

Link producers versus association producers: a practical comparison

The categories overlap. A useful research report may attract links naturally and later create easy outreach opportunities. A resource-page relationship may become a co-marketing partnership. The value of the model is not rigid classification; it is better resource allocation.

A healthy program normally combines both. The split changes based on maturity.

A new site may put 70% of its effort into creating excellent destination pages and pursuing link-producer opportunities, while reserving 30% for one or two association-building assets. An established company might invert that mix: maintain technical hygiene and reclamation, but focus most of its budget on research, partnerships, and PR-worthy work that competitors cannot easily clone.

How to choose the right mix for your site

The best link building strategy starts with an honest assessment of the website, not a list of tactics copied from a competitor.

Scenario one: a new website with limited authority

Prioritize pages worth linking to before increasing outreach volume. A homepage is rarely the best first destination. Build several focused assets that solve a clear user problem: a tutorial, comparison guide, glossary, template, tool, original workflow, or research-backed explainer.

Then run targeted link-producer campaigns. Review competitor backlinks for content patterns, identify maintained resource pages, find broken references in your niche, and reclaim legitimate unlinked mentions. Keep prospect lists small enough that every pitch can be specific.

At the same time, start one modest association initiative. Interview practitioners for an article, publish a small dataset from your own customer base with appropriate privacy safeguards, or develop a useful template. The goal is to build a foundation for the bigger campaigns you will be able to run later.

Scenario two: an established site with a constrained budget

This is the most common middle stage. The site has some rankings, content, and domain history, but the marketing team cannot spend six months building a large research platform.

Use a balanced portfolio. Continue with high-confidence reclamation and partnership work because these can produce efficient wins. Then choose a small number of association projects with repeat potential: a quarterly benchmark, an expert-commentary process, a signature annual report, or a customer-data trend analysis.

Avoid spreading the team across ten unrelated campaigns. One genuinely useful asset, supported by outreach, social distribution, sales enablement, and partner amplification, is worth more than a pile of under-promoted PDFs.

Scenario three: a well-known brand with resources

For a brand that already has baseline authority, generic link prospecting may produce diminishing returns. The company should spend more time asking what it can publish, discover, build, or convene that nobody else can.

That could mean proprietary research, a free product utility, a high-quality industry index, a community initiative, a scholarship program with genuine educational value, a strong customer-story engine, or partnerships that create practical documentation and implementation content.

The bar is higher because competitors can reproduce basic outreach mechanics. They cannot easily reproduce a respected research franchise, years of expert relationships, or a tool that becomes part of a customer’s workflow.

Build pages that deserve the link before you send the email

Outreach cannot rescue a weak destination page. Before prospecting, review the page through the eyes of an editor deciding whether it improves their content.

Ask these questions:

• Does the page answer the topic more completely, accurately, or recently than existing resources?
• Is the author or organization qualified to make the claims?
• Does it include examples, data, visuals, templates, definitions, or a tool that makes it more useful?
• Is the page easy to scan, trustworthy, technically accessible, and free of aggressive pop-ups?
• Would a reader thank the publisher for linking to it?

Google’s guidance recommends people-first content and asks site owners to make clear who created content, how it was produced, and why it exists. Those principles are just as useful for earning editorial links as they are for organic search. Editors need a reason to trust what they are recommending. (developers.google.com)

For teams using AI to speed up production, this standard is particularly important. AI can help analyze data, organize research, draft a survey, or create a first outline. It should not become a machine for producing hundreds of thin pages designed only to create outreach targets. Google explicitly warns that generating many pages without adding user value can violate its policy on scaled content abuse. (developers.google.com)

A better workflow for competitor backlink analysis

Competitor research is often mishandled. Teams export thousands of backlinks, filter by a third-party authority score, and send the same request to everyone. That produces a noisy list, not a strategy.

Instead, use competitor analysis to answer three questions.

1. Which pages earn links?

Separate homepage and navigation links from editorial links to blog posts, tools, reports, templates, and product pages. Look for repeated content patterns. If several competitors earn links to original statistics, that may signal demand for evidence. If tool pages attract citations, it may suggest that your audience values utility over another opinion piece.

2. Why did the publisher link?

Open the referring page. Was the link included as a source, an example, a recommended tool, a partner, a quote, or a replacement for a dead page? The reason matters more than the metric.

A product-review link may require a product worth reviewing. A citation in a university guide may require genuinely authoritative research. A resource-list link may be possible only if the page is actively maintained and your asset fills a visible gap.

3. What can you do better or differently?

Do not aim to copy every competitor backlink. Many are relationship-driven, historical, paid, irrelevant, or impossible to replicate ethically. Use the pattern to develop a stronger page and a more precise prospect list.

For instance, if a competitor earns links to a generic “email marketing tips” post, do not necessarily write the same listicle. Create a more defensible resource: a deliverability troubleshooting flowchart, an interactive subject-line testing worksheet, or a study based on opted-in campaign data. The differentiated asset gives outreach a real story.

Digital PR that earns attention instead of vanity metrics

Digital PR is often described as a shortcut to high-authority links. It is not. It is a content and distribution discipline that succeeds when a story is useful, timely, surprising, well-evidenced, and relevant to a publication’s readers.

A campaign does not need a massive survey to work. Good angles can emerge from:

• Aggregated and anonymized internal product trends.
• Public datasets analyzed in a novel, transparent way.
• Expert predictions tied to a real change in the market.
• Regional or vertical-specific findings that a targeted publication can localize.
• A new free tool that makes a complicated task simpler.
• A practical response to a timely industry problem.

The crucial step is to design the campaign around a claim that can withstand scrutiny. Document the methodology. Explain sample sizes and limitations. Avoid causation claims when the data establishes only correlation. Provide a clear media page with charts, source material, and quotes from a qualified spokesperson.

A useful rule: if the campaign’s only interesting feature is that it contains a large number, it probably needs more work. The best projects explain why the number matters to a particular audience.

Partnerships are an underused association engine

Many startups have more link-building leverage in their partner ecosystem than in cold outreach. Technology partners, agencies, affiliates, communities, customers, vendors, investors, and integration platforms all create opportunities for useful, legitimate cross-publishing.

The keyword is useful. A logo page with dozens of outbound links is seldom the highest-value outcome. Better examples include:

• An integration guide explaining a real workflow.
• A joint webinar with a transcript and actionable resource hub.
• A customer case study with performance context and implementation details.
• A co-authored industry report.
• A marketplace listing that clearly explains setup, capabilities, and limitations.
• A partner comparison or migration guide built around a genuine decision point.

These placements tend to be more resilient because they are connected to actual business relationships and user tasks. They also create referral paths that can produce leads, not just SEO reports.

For product-led software companies, this work should involve product marketing, customer success, partnerships, sales, and support—not only SEO. The best links are frequently a byproduct of making the customer journey easier.

Measure outcomes beyond referring-domain counts

Links are inputs. Business results are the outcome. If you judge every campaign only by the number of acquired domains, you will be tempted to favor low-effort placements over high-quality work that compounds over time.

Track a scorecard that includes both direct and indirect indicators:

1. Relevant referring domains: Did the campaign earn links from sites genuinely related to your market or audience?
2. Placement quality: Was the link editorial, visible, contextual, and likely to be maintained?
3. Referral traffic and engagement: Did visitors from the placement read, sign up, activate, or convert?
4. Target-page performance: Did impressions, rankings, assisted conversions, or organic entrances improve for the linked page and adjacent topic cluster?
5. Brand demand: Are branded searches, direct visits, newsletter subscribers, inbound partnership requests, or media inquiries increasing?
6. Campaign efficiency: What did the asset, outreach, and relationship work cost relative to the outcomes it generated?

Google Search Console remains the core first-party source for monitoring search clicks, impressions, queries, pages, and click-through rates. Google also provides reporting for performance in generative AI features for eligible properties, which can help teams examine how pages appear in those experiences rather than relying exclusively on third-party visibility estimates. (support.google.com)

Do not expect clean one-to-one attribution. A strong mention may influence future branded searches or sales conversations weeks later. That is exactly why association-producing work needs broader measurement than “did this URL pass authority?”

Avoid the shortcuts that can damage the strategy

A link building strategy should be ambitious, but it must stay inside the boundaries of editorial value and search policy. Google’s spam policies prohibit link spam, including buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation, and low-quality directory or bookmark links built mainly to manipulate rankings. Violations can cause pages or sites to rank lower or be omitted from results. (developers.google.com)

That makes several common practices risky:

• Buying placements on irrelevant blogs simply because their metrics look strong.
• Sending templated outreach at huge volume with no evidence the page fits.
• Using exact-match anchor text as a requirement in editorial pitches.
• Publishing superficial “link bait” that has no audience value.
• Trading links at scale instead of building actual partnerships.
• Creating fake expert profiles, fake surveys, or unsupported statistics.

The safest test is simple: would this placement still make sense if search engines ignored the link entirely? If the answer is no, rethink it.

A 90-day link building strategy for a growing company

Teams often need a plan more concrete than “do PR and outreach.” Here is a practical 90-day structure that combines both producer types without requiring a large in-house SEO department.

Days 1-30: establish the foundation

Audit the pages you want links to. Improve their accuracy, examples, page experience, calls to action, authorship, and internal linking. Identify three competitors and analyze the content types—not merely the domains—that have earned their editorial links.

Build a prospect list of 50 to 100 highly relevant opportunities across resource pages, broken references, partner sites, and unlinked mentions. At the same time, select one association asset to create, such as a benchmark report, template library, calculator, or expert-led guide.

Days 31-60: launch focused outreach and the asset

Run personalized outreach in small batches. Track replies by pitch angle and publisher type. Fix broken links and reclaim obvious lost links first because they usually have the clearest rationale.

Publish the association asset with a clear methodology, shareable visuals, and a short summary that a writer can understand quickly. Prepare distinct outreach angles for different audiences rather than sending every journalist the same generic announcement.

Days 61-90: double down on what created value

Review not just acquired links but response quality, referral traffic, and the kinds of pages that converted. Expand the best-performing outreach segment. Turn the strongest association asset into smaller derivatives: a webinar, visual summary, opinion piece, partner presentation, or follow-up analysis.

Finally, document the process. The goal is to create a repeatable system in which content, PR, partnerships, and SEO feed one another—not a sequence of one-off link hunts.

The real lesson: build reputation, not just backlinks

The original video’s distinction between link producers and association producers is useful because it reframes link building as a business maturity problem.

Early on, companies need accessible ways to earn discovery and credibility. That is what link producers provide. As they grow, they need more than replicable placements. They need evidence that the market recognizes them as a meaningful player in a topic, category, or ecosystem. That is what association producers help create.

The strongest link building strategy is therefore not “quantity versus quality.” It is a portfolio: efficient foundational work, useful assets, credible relationships, and stories that deserve to travel. Build pages people want to reference, give publishers a specific reason to care, and measure whether the work is improving visibility, trust, and customer outcomes—not merely a backlink count.

FAQ

What are link producers in SEO?

Link producers are repeatable link-building tactics that identify existing backlink opportunities. Common examples include competitor backlink analysis, resource-page outreach, broken-link building, lost-link reclamation, and outreach to relevant sites with a clear reason to update a page.

What are association producers in link building?

Association producers are higher-effort activities that create contextual brand recognition as well as links. They include original research, digital PR, expert commentary, strategic guest contributions, co-marketing, and partner-led content.

Which link-building approach is best for a new website?

New websites should usually begin with link producers because the tactics are more accessible and can help establish a baseline of relevant referring domains. However, they should still invest in at least one differentiated asset that can become the basis for future association-building campaigns.

Do backlinks still matter for AI search results?

Links remain part of Google’s broader systems for discovering and evaluating pages, while Google says its AI search features are grounded in core Search ranking and quality systems. No individual link guarantees visibility in AI-generated answers, but credible citations, useful content, and clear topical relevance are sound long-term investments.

Is digital PR better than broken-link building?

Neither is universally better. Broken-link building can be efficient when you have a strong replacement resource and a precise prospect list. Digital PR can create larger authority and brand gains when you have an original, timely story. The right choice depends on your site’s maturity, resources, and content assets.