skip to content

← back to the plays

independence4 unconnected · 1 more author in those circles
standing

contested · 5 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

outcome not stated

confidence

high

evidence

7 claims · 5 articles · 2 receipts

window

2017-10-10 → 2026-07-02

4 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Decide whether link building is your main skill

Competitive terms need links, and one operator calls link acquisition the single skill worth mastering once your content engine runs without you, waiting until a new site holds fifty articles before starting outreach. Set the quota low enough to actually happen and only chase sites in adjacent niches. How central this should be to a search programme is exactly what the practitioners here disagree on.

What both sides agree on

  • Do not start link building outreach on a new site until it holds about 50 articles.

Where this splits

Ron Stefanski names link building the most important marketing skill and spends most of his day on it, while Eli Schwartz argues against treating link acquisition as the whole of a search strategy.

5 claims against 1

Cory Zue · Justin Jackson · Ron Stefanski · Tibo Louis-Lucas

Master link building, it is the main skill

  1. 01Treat link building as the skill to actually get good at. It is where the time should go once the content engine runs without you.
  2. 02Accumulate inbound links from many different domains, with anchor text built from the keywords you are targeting, since link diversity moves domain authority, page authority and keyword relevance at once.
the objection · 1 claimEli Schwartz

Link acquisition is not a whole search strategy

Stop treating link acquisition as the whole of your search strategy.

  1. 03Accept that competitive keywords need backlinks, and that pages carrying structured data markup appear to get rewarded.
  2. 04Only pursue links from sites in adjacent niches, since a link from a site unrelated to your space counts for almost nothing with either search or AI.
  3. 05Set the outreach quota low enough to actually happen: contact one site this weekend.

What it returned

  • The founder names it the single most important skill for marketing a website and says most of his working day is now reviewing what his editor publishes and building links.

  • That is the threshold the founder waits for on every new site before contacting anyone.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.

More in seo

all seo plays

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.