This interview is with Asawar Ali, CEO, Link Building Agency.
To kick us off, can you briefly introduce yourself as CEO and share the kinds of brands you help grow through backlink strategy and SEO?
Asawar Ali is the CEO and founder of a Link Building Agency established to earn high-authority backlinks that improve rankings, rather than backlinks that only serve to meet a quota. As a former developer, he sees link building as engineering a system instead of a game of chance. The methods developed from his technical background have enabled the agency to improve its domain vetting and anchor-text mapping against site text profiles.
The clients his agency works with fall into three main categories:
- The first category comprises SaaS and tech companies that possess a quality product but, due to a lack of media engagement, don’t appear in the crucial searches for them.
- The second category includes founders and agencies that need fast authority signals to gain a competitive edge over long-time rival companies with well-established backlinking profiles.
- The final category comprises companies that need clean linking profiles following neglected link schemes.
The work combines HARO and digital PR with white-hat placements geared towards DR60-90 sites where placements can have an impact. This has meant getting links in outlets like Forbes, CNN, WSJ, and Business Insider. Those logos build a link profile that outlasts algorithm updates and provides Google a reason to trust and rank a brand.
Looking back, what was the turning point that led you to the CEO role in this space, and how did that experience shape your approach to link building and client acquisition?
The pivotal moment was when I discovered that the thing I excelled at as a developer—building systems that yield predictable results—filled a gap in link building. While working with PHP and Laravel, there was logic at every stage: input, process, and result. However, the majority of SEO agencies I observed didn’t have a process; it was strategy in name only, with nothing but guesswork behind it. Many agencies were buying dozens of links, thinking that would do the work, without any understanding of why one link was meaningful and another wasn’t. There was a huge gap in the market and a real need. This ultimately motivated me to establish the agency and take on the role of CEO. I hadn’t intended to set up a company; the aim was to fix the process, and then everything else would follow. Keeping that developer mindset, the client’s backlink profile is treated the same way as a codebase. The process and everything linked in that profile must be audited. Only the necessary components to ensure optimal output are then added.
Two things resulted from that. In terms of link building, I became obsessed with relevance, authority, and link quality. I would much rather secure a small number of quality links from outlets that a brand’s audience actually reads, and that fall within the DR60-90 range, than a ton of links that provide no value and are only meant to fill a spreadsheet. Regarding client acquisition, I became averse to making big promises. I’m much more comfortable letting someone know the limitations with respect to a specific goal than offering them a fairy tale. The clients who are most understanding and who are ultimately the best to work with are the ones who have the most realistic expectations.
Starting from zero authority, describe a campaign you personally ran to win the first 2–3 authoritative backlinks for a new site—who you targeted, what you pitched, and the outcome you saw.
When starting with an empty site, I don’t aim high. That is where others go wrong. The very first backlinks need to be attainable and relevant, and they will help build the site’s backlink profile and set the stage for future links.
I build a campaign but keep in mind it has to bend to the new site’s and niche’s needs. The first piece of this campaign is a reactive step and a bit of setup: the new site will go on HARO and similar services. This is where I leverage the founder’s expertise. Cold pitching rarely gets a reply unless you are pitching an actively sought-after expert; most newly minted sites simply don’t stand out. I take aim at the queries and look for journalists writing pieces where my client’s lived experience is the answer, not a stretch. A founder who built a product in a specific space can credibly speak to that space, and that credibility is what gets the link.
I keep my pitches short. I concentrate on very specific parts of the article that allow me to provide a quote that is genuinely helpful to the author and the piece. I also explain why the source is valuable to the article. Because of this, I earn a link.
Hopefully, the first two to three placements generated by my campaign are in the mid-DR range. These will be quality, relevant placements. This is a difficult goal to achieve for a new domain, and appropriately so. The link is used by Google to help provide an authoritative signal for the new domain. These placements also provide material evidence that helps secure placements in higher-tier publications. I don’t expect a jump in traffic from these placements, since the new domain isn’t ranking yet, but I aim for a justified starting profile that will help grow the domain and lead to a compounding effect down the line. Once the first relevant links are in place, every other pitch is easier, since the site is no longer an unknown.
When migrations break links, in your most recent recovery what exact steps did you take in your 301‑first link reclamation playbook, and which metric told you it worked?
Migrations are the major source of lost equity. When exported links become dead, the team often doesn’t notice until rankings are affected. I work on a 301-first assumption in migrations because I seek to recover lost links on the server. Controlling a redirect is much better than relying on a webmaster who no longer edits links they added two years ago.
My process is the same every time:
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Analyze the inbound links for the old URL structure. This shows which pages were linked to, which had gained links, and the authority of each linking page. This helps me prioritize pages by value.
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Map every old URL that had backlinks to pages on the new site. Mapping every URL where possible helps me redirect link equity. Redirecting all old URLs to the home page is bad practice: it makes the old pages irrelevant and wastes equity.
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Cleaning stage: carry out the 301 mapping with a direct, single-hop redirect.
- Check for redirect loops and chains. Redirecting pages multiple times, or redirecting pages in a migratory fashion, deteriorates equity and slows page crawls.
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Outreach: only after the server-side restoration is complete, I contact site owners to request they edit links that cannot be preserved through redirects.
My preferred metric for knowing the recovery worked is not a vanity metric but the restoration of crawl status and rankings for impacted pages. More specifically, I look for high-value backlinks that used to resolve to 404s to resolve to a clean 200 via the redirect, the referring-domain count on migrated pages returning to pre-migration levels, and the organic rankings for the URLs recovering to previous levels. I consider the equity transfer successful when referring domains match and rankings have been restored. If rankings remain low despite a normal count of links, it’s usually an indicator that a redirect chain is leaking somewhere; in that case I resume the audit.
On anchor text, describe a specific instance where shifting a page’s anchor distribution toward brand/natural phrases changed rankings, including your before/after and key takeaway.
The same pattern appears frequently: a page finishes ranking and then later stagnates or declines without an apparent cause. The content appears adequate, and the links are still functioning. Analyzed via the anchor profile, the issue becomes apparent: the page is full of exact-match commercial anchors. Frequently, this is the result of a prior agency that built a multitude of links all pointing with the same commercial keyword. The profile appears contrived, and in this case, it is. Google has been neglecting this signal for a while, but an active suppression of the page begins at a certain ratio.
What needs to be done is to shift the distribution toward what an organically earned profile looks like. This profile consists predominantly of branded and naturally earned links. The majority of anchors I bring in are:
- the brand’s name
- a naked URL
- a naturally occurring phrase
This illustrates how a journalist or a person links a source the right way. The focus is not on removing the existing exact-match links but on introducing a large number of earned and branded links so the exact-match links become diluted on a ratio basis.
The before/after images show a page that was stuck on the second page of search results with an almost identical profile. When the branded and naturally anchored links start to surpass the commercial links, the suppression is removed and the page moves up higher in search results for the terms it was meant to be.
The most important thing to remember, and something I tell all my clients, is that anchor text is a trust indicator and not a way to signpost keywords. The moment you start using it to signpost your most targeted keywords, you end up doing exactly the opposite of what you intended and create a pattern that Google has filters built to catch. You’ll end up creating trust signals for you and your clientele.
After a major Google update, tell us about a time you paused a link tactic because it failed your “would it exist without Google?” test, and what you doubled down on instead.
That test is the standard I use for everything, and I have major updates to thank for that trust. The question is: if Google didn’t have a ranking algorithm, would this link still exist? If a link only exists to manipulate rankings, that link is a liability. This is the sort of link the updates for spam and links are designed to find and neutralize. Furthermore, the equity it passes is borrowed, not owned.
The tactic that was consistently failing my test was, and still is to some extent, mass guest blogging on networks that exist solely to host sponsored content. These networks have no real readership or editorial standards and would cease to exist if paid content dried up. On top of that, those placements are ignored during updates, and any resulting rankings are worthless. That’s when I started to adjust my strategy and stop relying on guest blogging networks. They fail the test because those articles are never read and never cited.
What I focused on instead was earned media — HARO and digital PR placements. Here, a real reporter quotes the client because the client is a trustworthy source for an article the reporter is writing. This type of placement not only passes the test but is also likely to be cited even if Google had no rankings, because it is intended to inform the reader, not the search engine. These placements maintain their worth during any changes because the algorithm is trying to determine whether this is a link a real editor chose to give. If you only build links that would survive Google disappearing, your fear of updates will go away. Instead, updates will serve to clear out competitors who took the shortcut.
As CEO, how do you convert HARO/digital PR wins into measurable client acquisition—walk us through your attribution setup and the single KPI you rely on to prove ROI?
Wins serve a dual purpose because they help grow both my clients and my agency.
When it comes to client acquisition, placements speak for themselves. A founder on the fence about hiring a link building agency is not going to want to read a bunch of marketing claims. Instead, they’ll want to see evidence of past placements with agencies like mine in major media outlets such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and even CNN. Thus, a digital PR win becomes a lead seeder for my agency. Because of my previous work, the onboarding conversation is no longer a pitch against the void. That’s the simplest acquisition channel I can think of.
To prove ROI to clients, link-building attribution must be transparent. Link building lags behind other conversions, like paid ads, which are instant. My attribution model delineates link events from business events and preserves the link-event → business-event chain. When a link goes up, I mark it in my logs to later analyze the downstream. I pay close attention to the chain:
- Did the linking domain register and pass equity?
- Did the target page acquire enough equity to rank for the desired keywords?
- Did the ranking shift improve traffic?
- Did the traffic help achieve conversions?
The model works like a series of checkpoints and helps me uncover where attribution broke, especially if the expected outcome doesn’t materialize.
The only KPI I use for ROI discussions is organic-attributed conversions, which include the leads or revenue from organic search that reach the pages. I consider referring-domain growth and ranking improvements the work’s leading indicators; they are almost always meaningful, even though they require effort. Still, leading indicators do not pay the bills. The only number that will show the worth of the engagement is whether the client received more qualified business through organic search on the previously touched pages than before the engagement. I do not consider an SEO engagement a win if rankings have improved and conversions have not, because traffic or page intent may be mismatched and beyond scope. Everything should lead back to that single intended number, and that is why the client is judged on a results-oriented engagement rather than the typical engagement that focuses on vanity metrics.
To keep publishers onside and earn relevant, lasting links, what does your ideal journalist pitch look like—from subject line to proof points—when you’re speaking in the publisher’s voice?
The pitch starts with this reframe: I am not asking a journalist for a favor. I am giving them something to make their job easier. This statement is the basis for every decision I make in the pitch. I must do my best to ensure journalists on a tight deadline stay motivated to write a better story without having to expend extra effort to find and quote another source.
There are not many things a subject line has to do. Answering a journalist’s question after a HARO query is a popular subject line. I like to keep it clear and make it obvious that my email responds to the query, so it is on topic and can be easily located during a five-second triage of their inbox. For colder outreach, my subject line will be the story I think deserves to be told.
The answer will be given in the opening line, never in the greeting. There are no excuses or unrequested praise written in my emails. I start with my insight, fully formed and substantive, because I want the first line to be the deciding factor in whether they continue reading. I also want to give them a great quote, so I write with the clarity and concern of someone who is thoughtful, and so they can drop it straight into the piece without editing.
Proof points must justify the quote. I briefly explain the source’s credibility and the person’s relevant role. I then report their relevant experience and include a detail or figure that demonstrates my knowledge of the relevant topics. Proper proof points must be relevant to the argument. Unrelated proof points are just filler.
I also make sure to stop there and do not ask the source for a link or request anything from them. Good pitches justify a quote and, thus, the source’s citation with strong supporting evidence. Value add gets a link. Related value add is what keeps publishers happy. If I provide a journalist with something clear, proofed, and relevant, they will prioritize my future pitches. The value of the relationship is justified through well-executed pitches that fulfill the requests.
Putting it all together, if you had 90 days to move a revenue page from mid–page two to page one primarily through links, what exact playbook would you run and in what order?
A page on page two tells me it’s relevant and will be more authoritative. I’m closing a gap, not starting from nothing. The order matters here just as much as the tactics.
Weeks one and two are the diagnosis phase — no links are built. I collect the page’s backlinks and anchors, compare them to the backlinks on page one using a link gap analysis, and check the page’s internal links. The gap determines the playbook: it tells me what additional authority the winners have that I must obtain.
By the end of week four, I make adjustments to reclaim lost links with 301s, adjust internal links to favor the revenue page, and improve the anchor ratio if it’s skewed toward exact match. These adjustments are often enough to generate movement prior to the investment in outreach.
Weeks three through eight are the planned earned links campaign. Those are the HARO and digital PR efforts geared toward getting links that close the audit gaps. I keep anchor ratios mostly on the branded and natural side to balance and slowly grow the anchor profile. I focus on links to the target page where it is most natural and on supportive content that is interlinked to the target page.
The objective of weeks eight through twelve is to focus efforts on the outreach that has generated the greatest response. The new coverage provides me with enough proof to pursue the highest DR outreach and obtain the highest-authority, most relevant links to close the gap.
Honestly, the reality here is that we’re looking at page one within 90 days for this specific scenario (we’re already at page two and the competition is manageable). For situations involving more established competitors, it might land on the bottom of page one, but it will be moving in the right direction. Setting tempered expectations is better than saying we can guarantee something that is really out of our control.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
One piece of advice is to stop trying to buy backlinks and start earning them. Chasing backlinks has led the industry to treat them as something to buy and attach, rather than something genuine editors and journalists give. Focus on the backlinks that would still exist if Google ceased to exist. Maintain a natural anchor profile. This will keep you ahead of algorithm updates. The competitors who have taken shortcuts will suffer the most when the algorithm updates.
You have to realize that earned authority will always be more valuable than backlinks that you pay for.