/seo-backlinks

name: seo-backlinks
description: "Plan and run off-page SEO to earn links and brand mentions, including for AI visibility. Input: a site, niche, and competitors. Output: a link strategy and 90-day plan, a profile review without paid tools, ninja linking, digital PR on proprietary data, broken-link building, linkable assets, and unlinked-mention conversion. Use for backlinks, link building, netlinking, domain authority, anchor text, guest posts, digital PR, disavow or toxic links, or evaluating a single link opportunity."
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: "Sorank (https://sorank.com)"
  version: "1.0.0"

SEO Backlinks: Strategy, Acquisition, and Brand Mentions

Most SEO tooling stops at link analysis: it tells you what your profile looks like and leaves you alone for the hard part. This skill covers the hard part: how to actually acquire links and brand mentions, by hand, with a defensible strategy, without a paid tool subscription and without an outreach agency.

It operates on a dual objective that defines off-page SEO in 2026:

1. **Links for Google.** Backlinks remain a major ranking factor in classic organic search. 2. **Mentions everywhere for LLMs.** Brand mentions (linked or not) correlate roughly 3x more strongly with visibility in AI answers than backlinks do. Ahrefs measured this across 75,000 brands: correlation of 0.664 for brand mentions versus 0.218 for backlinks against AI Overview presence (https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/).

Every action this skill recommends should serve at least one of those two objectives, and the best actions serve both: a profile on a well-known platform is a link for Google and a citation surface for ChatGPT.

Company knowledge first (Obsidian)

If the working environment contains an Obsidian vault or any local knowledge base (a folder of .md notes, often with a .obsidian directory), read the relevant notes before acting: brand and product facts, target keywords, competitors, and the SEO action log of what was already tried. Ground every recommendation in that context instead of asking the user for facts the vault already holds. At the end of the session, append the actions taken to the vault's SEO action log so the next session starts informed.

When to use this skill

Use it when the user wants to:

• Review or audit a backlink profile (theirs or a competitor's).
• Build a link acquisition plan (weekly cadence, 90-day program, campaign).
• Execute ninja linking: find and work concrete link spots one by one.
• Decide whether a specific link opportunity is worth taking (or buying).
• Recover or understand a drop attributed to off-page factors (spam updates, lost links).
• Increase brand mentions so AI assistants cite the brand in answers.

Related skills, and where the boundary sits:

| Skill | Boundary with this skill | |---|---| | seo-geo-audit | Full-site audit. It flags off-page weaknesses; this skill fixes them. | | seo-local | Local citations, Google Business Profile, NAP consistency. Send all local citation work there. | | geo-tracking | Measures AI citations and share of voice. This skill creates the mentions; geo-tracking measures them. | | geo-visibility | Overall AI answer presence strategy (content, entities). This skill covers the off-site mention layer. | | seo-keyword-research | Provides the keyword map that informs anchor text variation and target pages. | | seo-content-blog | Creates the linkable content (studies, guides, guest articles) this skill promotes. | | seo-content-product-page, seo-content-service-page, seo-content-collection-page | Build the money pages that deep links should point to. | | seo-internal-linking | Distributes incoming link equity from linked pages to the rest of the site. | | seo-technical | Redirects that preserve link equity, crawlability of linked URLs, canonical hygiene. | | seo-schema-markup | Organization schema with sameAs pointing to the profiles built here. |

Strategy doctrine

Internalize these principles before recommending any tactic. They are the reasoning layer; tactics change, doctrine does not.

The five criteria of a good link

Evaluate every opportunity against all five. A link that fails on relevance or placement is rarely worth the effort, whatever its authority.

| # | Criterion | What to check | Why it matters | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Source domain authority | Established site, real organic traffic, indexed pages | Authority transfers. A link from a trusted domain carries more weight and more referral traffic. | | 2 | Topical relevance | Source covers your industry or the page topic | A link from a mid-authority site in your sector beats a stronger off-topic link. Relevance tells Google what you are an authority on. | | 3 | Language match | Source site language = language of your target market | Language is a geographic signal. French links rank you in France; English links rank you in English-speaking markets. | | 4 | Anchor naturalness | Varied anchors: brand, URL, generic, partial match | Fifty identical exact-match anchors is the single most readable footprint of manipulation. Natural profiles are messy. | | 5 | Placement in content | In the body of an article, surrounded by relevant text | An in-content link beats a footer link, a sidebar link, or a slot in a 500-link resources page. Position signals editorial intent. |

External anchors are the opposite of internal anchors. Internal links use keyword anchors on purpose (see seo-internal-linking); external links should default to the brand name, the bare URL, or a generic phrase ("click here", "discover"). Keep exact-match keyword anchors on inbound external links close to zero: a keyword-heavy external anchor profile is the clearest over-optimization footprint there is, and it gets worse, not better, as more links arrive. (field heuristic from 115+ agency audits)

Follow and nofollow: take both

Since 2019, Google treats nofollow as a hint, not a directive, and added rel="sponsor