There seems to be a never endling selection of link building tools.

But the most effective ones don’t “manufacture” backlinks—they help you earn them by making it easier to publish truly useful content, find relevant audiences, and build real relationships. If your process and tools involes automation that sprays links around the web, you’re not doing link building—you’re doing link spam.

Google’s own documentation draws a bright line here: links created primarily to manipulate ranking fall under “link spam,” including automated link creation services and excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”). 

At the same time, Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) are a great lens for what “helpful” linking looks like in practice. The QRG teaches raters to distinguish between Main Content (MC)—the part that “directly helps the page achieve its purpose”—and Supplementary Content (SC) like navigation and sidebars. That distinction matters for link building, because the most trustworthy links are typically the ones that appear naturally inside the Main Content of a relevant article, where they genuinely help a reader.

Below are major tool types, with a white-hat-first approach.

These tools help you understand:

• Who links to your competitors (and why)

• Which pages earn links naturally

• What anchor text patterns look natural vs. manipulative

• Which links are likely editorial vs. paid/templated

White-hat use: treat backlink data as market research. If competitor guides are earning citations, that’s a signal to create something better—more original analysis, better visuals, fresher data, clearer explanations, or a stronger point of view.

Avoid: exporting a list and blasting templated outreach to every domain. That turns “insight” into spam very quickly.

Prospecting tools help you find sites and pages that are topically aligned with your content. Some focus on keywords and SERPs; others use topic graphs, entities, or “similar sites” discovery.

White-hat use: prioritize topical fit and editorial standards. A single relevant, context-rich mention from an article that truly overlaps your subject is often worth more than dozens of random mentions.

This is where the QRG idea of Main Content vs. Supplementary Content becomes practical: you want links that belong in the MC, because they help the page achieve its purpose (educate, explain, compare, provide evidence).

Links buried in footers, blogrolls, or template widgets are much easier to classify as “site plumbing,” not editorial recommendation—and Google’s spam policies explicitly flag widely distributed footer/template links and low-quality placements. 

Content tools aren’t “link tools” on the surface, but they may be the most important category for white-hat outcomes. They help you:

• Map the questions people actually ask

• Build a comprehensive, well-structured article

• Add original elements (tables, diagrams, calculators, examples)

• Improve readability, internal linking, and page UX
  
  

White-hat use: create ontent that deserves citation. In QRG terms, your MC should be clearly the reason the page exists, and its quality heavily influences perceived page quality. If your content is thin, generic, or padded with filler, you’re giving other writers no reason to reference you.

Outreach tools help manage:

• Target lists and contact discovery

• Email sequences (carefully!)

• Relationship history and notes

• Campaign tracking (opens, replies, placements)

White-hat use: personalize outreach around reader value. Instead of “Can you link to us?”, lead with: “We published a resource your readers might find useful because it answers X / includes Y dataset / provides Z example.” If the link doesn’t improve their article, don’t ask for it.

A good rule: if you’d feel weird about the email being forwarded to the editor-in-chief, rewrite it.

These tools help you protect the links you already earned:

• Monitor new/lost links

• Reclaim unlinked brand mentions

• Fix broken backlinks (301s, updated URLs)

• Catch accidental noindex/canonical issues

White-hat use: link reclamation is one of the cleanest plays in SEO. You’re not asking for an unnatural link—you’re fixing a citation that already exists (or should have been linked for usability).

Let’s address link exchange tools directly. Some platforms promote “white-hat link exchanges,” but the risk is obvious: when the primary motivation is ranking manipulation, you drift into link spam territory—especially at scale. Google explicitly calls out excessive link exchanges as a link spam example. 

If you’re going to consider any reciprocal linking at all, anchor it to the QRG’s concept of Main Content: the only links worth pursuing are those that would naturally appear as part of a helpful, topically aligned article—one blog post citing another blog post because it improves the reader’s understanding. MC exists to fulfill a page’s purpose; links placed in MC should serve that same purpose. 

And, think in terms of reciprocity with the person, not the site. Ideally you'll link from your site A to their site B, and they'll link from their site C to your site D. Less idea is your site A to their site B and their site B to your site C, but avoid reciprocating links directly between two sites unless the links REALLY make sense from the readers perspective.

What that looks like in practice:

• Two sites in the same niche publish genuinely useful posts.

• Each editor independently decides the other post is a helpful reference.

• The link is placed contextually in the article body (Main Content), not in a sidebar, footer, “resources” page, or templated partner directory.

• There’s no “swap requirement,” no quotas, and no “partner pages exclusively for cross-linking” behavior.

In short: editorial relevance first, reciprocity never as the goal.

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines are used by human raters to evaluate results and help improve ranking systems; their ratings don’t directly change rankings. But as a practical north star for link building, they’re useful because they reinforce what high-quality pages look like—clear purpose, strong main content, and links that help users rather than manipulate them. 

If your tools help you build that, you’re playing the long game—and that’s the only game that compounds.