A link report can look healthy while the outreach behind it gives publishers little reason to care. For marketers planning next year’s off-page work, the useful question is not just how many links a campaign produced, but why those placements deserved to exist.
In The Link Building Graveyard: What To Bury & What Still Wins, Michael Johnson, CEO and founder of Resolve, explained which tactics he would leave behind and which he would fund heading into 2027. Loren Baker hosted the October 21 webinar, including a Q&A on publisher quality, listicles, and digital PR.
Johnson’s central test was practical: a worthwhile link should benefit the brand, the publisher, and the publisher’s audience. His keep-or-cut framework applied that test to both search rankings and AI visibility, without treating a higher link count as the goal.
Stop Letting Domain Metrics Make The Decision
Johnson argued against making Domain Authority or Domain Rating the primary measure of a placement. A high score did not establish topical expertise, a useful audience, or a sensible reason for the publisher to link to a brand.
Discussing those scores, Michael Johnson said:
“These are third-party metrics. They’re not Google signals, and they’re easy to inflate.”
See the full on-demand clip at 20:18.
During the Q&A, Johnson made the qualification process more concrete. He recommended checking topical relevance first, then looking beyond an estimated traffic total to the keywords a site actually ranked for. A supposed technology publication attracting unrelated celebrity searches would deserve a closer look, regardless of its domain score.
His point was not to discard metrics entirely. It was to use them after judging whether a site had real subject expertise and an audience the brand wanted to reach.
Bury The Manipulation, Not Every Familiar Tactic
Johnson’s cut list included private blog networks, link-swap schemes, forced commercial anchors, and generic requests to be added to roundups. He also challenged the habit of directing most outreach toward product pages when a guide, dataset, or tool would give an editor a stronger reason to cite the site.
That distinction mattered. He did not argue that genuine partners should never link to each other, or that a product page could never earn a useful backlink. He objected to making an artificial pattern the foundation of the program.
Several familiar approaches remained on his keep list when the execution served readers:
- Guest contributions: Offer subject expertise and useful resources rather than a thin article built around a commercial anchor.
- Broken-link and resource-page outreach: Help a publisher repair or improve a resource with an asset that genuinely fits its audience.
- Unlinked mentions: Look for existing coverage where adding a link would help readers find the brand or product already being discussed.
- Expert commentary: Respond to journalist requests only when the spokesperson could provide relevant, substantive expertise.
In one client example, Johnson described converting existing product-related brand mentions into links to the relevant product page. The opportunity came from the context of the coverage, not from forcing a product URL into unrelated content.
See Johnson’s product-link example in the full on-demand webinar at 27:54.
Give Roundup Editors A Reason To Include You
Johnson drew a sharp line between asking for a placement and improving a publisher’s list. A generic request to add another brand did neither the editor nor the audience a favor.
His approach to earning inclusion in listicles began with studying the companies already featured. What qualified them? What useful distinction could the missing brand contribute? A relevant feature, fresh data, or a helpful tool could create a case for inclusion; wanting the backlink was not that case.
Baker also asked whether a roundup could still offer AI-search value when its links pointed through an affiliate program or to an Amazon product page. Johnson’s view was that the brand mention could still matter. He emphasized earning a legitimate recommendation rather than treating every roundup as an equally valuable target.
See why Johnson counted branded mentions as an AI visibility win in the full on-demand webinar at 8:57.
Build Assets That Give Outreach Something To Offer
For digital PR, Johnson favored original research that gave journalists a story they could not obtain elsewhere. He walked through campaigns built around workplace AI concerns and travel costs to illustrate how a dataset could become a timely headline.
He also demonstrated an interactive news-desert map built from public data and paired with an explanatory guide. The asset gave journalism programs a relevant educational resource to consider linking to. The full session covered how he connected the tool to suitable resource pages, including why AI-generated prospect lists still needed human qualification.
See Johnson’s advice on writing guest posts around audience problems in the full on-demand webinar at 57:17.
In response to a question about inconsistent newsjacking returns, Johnson contrasted reacting to someone else’s news cycle with developing a proactive research program. He acknowledged that earned campaigns were not guaranteed to succeed. The case for repeating them rested on building a useful system, not promising that every pitch would land.
Turn The Keep-Or-Cut List Into A 90-Day Plan
Johnson organized the work into a sequence: audit the existing program, establish a baseline for relevant AI buying prompts, identify worthwhile publishers and resource pages, create the assets those audiences needed, and pitch them.
The 90-day execution walkthrough showed how those activities could build on each other instead of becoming disconnected campaigns. The first phase focused on current spending and opportunities; the next on research, asset creation, and outreach; the final phase on reviewing placements and developing the next useful asset.
To put that approach into practice, start with a small set of decisions:
- Review where the current link budget goes and flag placements with weak topical fit or no credible audience.
- Build a target list from relevant AI citations, competitor coverage, and audience-specific resource pages.
- Choose a dataset, tool, guide, or expert contribution that would improve those publishers’ coverage.
- Track relevant referring domains and linked or unlinked brand mentions alongside AI visibility and organic rankings.
Watch the on-demand webinar for Johnson’s campaign examples, qualification checks, and answers to the audience’s outreach questions.
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