By Rafał Moszkowcow Chomsky — Founder & CEO, NON.agency
Send a thousand cold emails to a thousand strangers and, on a good day, twenty of them write back. Rework the same pitch for people who already know your name — who’ve seen your work, met you at a conference, or read something you published — and the reply rate climbs past one in five. Same ask. Same link. Roughly ten times the yield.
That gap is the whole discipline.
For a decade, link building meant volume: buy a database, spray a template, guest-post your way onto anything with a pulse and a WordPress install. Google spent the back half of that decade dismantling it. Private blog networks, link exchanges, mass guest posting — one spam update after another turned yesterday’s shortcut into today’s liability. What survived looks far less like a link farm and far more like journalism and public relations: a real story, a real relationship, a real reason for an editor to hit publish.
I’ve watched that shift from the inside. Fifteen years running search operations — COO seats at The Search Initiative, Search Logistics and SUSO Digital before I built NON.agency — and a paper I published, Determining Relevance in Link Building, that argued the point before it was fashionable. The links that move rankings now are earned, editorial, and relevant. Everything else is rented, and the rent keeps going up.
So here is my list. Not a scored leaderboard, not an SEO tool’s export — a working operator’s read on the people who are genuinely best at earning links the hard, durable way. It’s opinionated on purpose. If you’d rank them differently, good: argue back.
How I picked them (the short version)
Four things decided the order, roughly in this priority:
Durability. Do the links survive Google’s spam and core updates, or evaporate the next time the algorithm cleans house? Earned beats bought, every time.
Method over volume. Anyone can hit send. I weighted relationships, newsworthiness, and craft — the things that push a reply rate from 2% to 20% — over sheer output.
A body of work. Named campaigns, named clients, named publications. Verifiable results, not vibes.
Influence on the field. Some of these people didn’t just do the work; they taught the rest of us how. That counts.
A note on transparency, because it matters: two people here sit inside my own orbit. One runs outreach for us. One is a friend and collaborator. I’ve flagged both. It’s still my list, and I’ll defend every name on it.
1. Carrie Rose — Rise at Seven
Rose founded Rise at Seven in 2019 after a Christmas TV ad taught her that culture drives search demand, and she’s spent the years since proving it at scale. Her agency turns cultural moments into national coverage — reactive campaigns for PrettyLittleThing, content for the Kardashians, links from Forbes and the Washington Post — and it grew past a hundred staff across the UK and US inside three years. In 2022 she bought out her co-founders to take sole ownership; Forbes put her on its 30 Under 30 list. What sets her apart is a refusal to separate brand and search: she treats a link as the byproduct of a story people actually want to share, which is exactly why the links stick. She sits at the top because more working link builders study her campaigns than anyone else’s.
2. Gisele Navarro — NeoMam Studios
Navarro started in link building in 2009, joined the content agency NeoMam Studios as Head of Outreach in 2014, and took over as CEO in 2020. NeoMam builds “hero content” — the data-rich, visual pieces journalists cite without being asked — and Navarro designed the promotion systems behind it. She’s also Managing Editor at HouseFresh, which gives her a second, sharper vantage point: she’s become one of the industry’s most credible voices on how Google’s updates gutted independent publishers. That combination is rare. She earns the links and she understands, from the receiving end, what makes an editorial link genuinely worth something. When Navarro talks about relevance, the whole field leans in.
3. Andreea Paluszak — NON.agency
Full disclosure, since I promised it: Paluszak leads outreach in our orbit. She’s also earned the spot. Over seven years she’s built more than 10,000 outreach links — not bought, not brokered, built — across markets and languages, which is the kind of number that only comes from doing the unglamorous work every day and getting steadily better at it. Cold outreach is a grind of rejection; the operators who last are the ones who treat every “no” as a data point and every “yes” as a relationship to keep. Paluszak is one of the best I’ve worked with at the manual craft — the part no tool has managed to replace. Rank her wherever you like. I put her third, and I stand behind it.
4. Kristin Tynski — Fractl
Tynski co-founded Fractl and turned data journalism into a link-building engine. Her team mines datasets for the story hiding inside them, then packages it so cleanly that outlets like The New York Times, USA Today and CNET run it — and link back. She pioneered research into the emotions that make content spread, years before “why things go viral” became a LinkedIn cliché. Now she’s building the next layer: LedeTime.ai, a generative-AI tool for PR research and outreach, and she talks openly about marketing “in a post-transformer world.” That’s the tell. The best data-PR practitioner in the field is also one of the first to industrialise it with AI, which is precisely where earned links are heading.
5. Miłosz Krasiński — Chilli Fruit Web Consulting
Another disclosure: Miłosz is a friend, and we’ve collaborated. He’d also be on this list if I’d never met him. He runs Chilli Fruit Web Consulting out of London, a boutique built on off-page SEO, link building and digital PR for SaaS and B2B brands — Surfer, Brand24, Userpilot among them. His signature move is relationship-driven LinkedIn outreach: warm, unconventional, and far more effective than the cold-email spray most of the industry still defaults to. Lately he’s repositioned around AI visibility, scoring each placement for whether it’ll surface inside AI answer engines, not just Google. That’s the right instinct. Krasiński has always chased the link others couldn’t reach; now he’s chasing the citation, too.
6. Jeremy Moser — uSERP
Moser co-founded uSERP in 2019 to do one thing: earn authoritative brand mentions at scale for venture-backed software companies. The client list — monday.com, Robinhood, Shopify, Freshworks — reads like a Series C pitch deck, and Forbes gave him a 30 Under 30 slot for it. He’s also one of the sharpest public analysts of where this is going. His recent point that AI engines pull from a brand’s own website only about 8% of the time when recommending it is the clearest one-line case I’ve seen for why off-page work now decides your AI visibility. If your name isn’t out there on sites the models trust, you don’t exist to them. Moser has been building for that reality longer than most.
7. Stewart Dunlop — LinkBuilder.io
Dunlop founded LinkBuilder.io in Edinburgh in 2016 with his brother Michael and did something quietly radical for a link-building agency: he practiced what he preached. No networking circuit, no podcast tour — they used SEO to generate their own leads, on the theory that an agency that can’t rank itself has no business ranking you. It worked. They served roughly a hundred clients, grew to a mid-seven-figure business, and sold to Next Net Media in 2023. His whole approach is bespoke white-hat link building for ambitious brands, and his proof of competence was always the company’s own front page.
8. Mark Rofe — Contrast / DigitalPRCourse
Rofe once rented a billboard to advertise himself for a date. It landed him on This Morning, Jimmy Fallon and Ellen — millions of impressions for the cost of a single hoarding — and it’s the perfect illustration of what he actually sells: manufactured newsworthiness. Now based in Barcelona as Head of Digital PR at the ecommerce agency Contrast, he also runs DigitalPRCourse.com, where he teaches the part of the job everyone finds hardest and most neglects: ideation. His argument is that you don’t need to be born creative to generate campaign ideas that earn coverage; you need to learn the patterns. He’s featured in thousands of publications, and he’s spent years reverse-engineering why.
9. Kevin Rowe — PureLinq
Rowe founded PureLinq and has spent 15-plus years welding public relations to search for enterprise clients — Coca-Cola, Novartis, Hyatt, VMware. His method is integrated by design: data campaigns and expert commentary that earn coverage and links as a single motion, rather than the two disciplines fighting over budget in separate departments. He publishes his own research — most recently on the correlation between brand mentions and top-three rankings — and writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Forbes. If Carrie Rose is the creative end of digital PR, Rowe is the analytical one: the operator who insists that earned links should be measured, modelled, and defended with data.
10. Bibi Raven — BibiBuzz
Raven — “the link builder,” self-styled agent of chaos — runs BibiBuzz from Amsterdam on a single, stubborn principle: natural link building by humans, not automation. No databases, no scraped lists, no send-and-pray. Every prospect is vetted by a person and every pitch is written to stand out in an inbox drowning in “I came across your article.” Over roughly seven years she’s built a boutique with a small remote outreach team and a large reputation, teaching her prospecting angles through a widely-followed course and a Search Engine Journal column. In a field racing to automate outreach into oblivion, Raven is the loudest, funniest argument for keeping a human in the loop — and her placement rates make the case better than her jokes do.
11. Shannon McGuirk — Aira
McGuirk crossed from traditional PR into SEO in 2016 and, at Aira, became one of the people who dragged creative digital PR into the mainstream of the search industry. She built the agency’s PR and content function and turned it into a repeatable system — the unglamorous work of process, briefs and pitch stacks — for consumer brands like TravelSupermarket and RS Components. She’s a fixture on the MozCon and BrightonSEO stages, where she’s spent years pushing back on the industry’s addiction to virality over consistency. That’s the mark of an operator, not a showman: she’d rather land ten solid links every month than one campaign that trends for a day and disappears.
12. Julie Joyce — Link Fish Media
Joyce founded Link Fish Media in 2007 and has built, by her own count, close to 20,000 links by hand — the majority in the ultra-competitive niches most agencies quietly refuse. A founding member of the SEO Chicks and, for the better part of a decade, the author of Search Engine Land’s monthly link-building column, she’s written more running commentary on this craft than almost anyone alive. She’s also refreshingly honest about it, which is rarer than it should be. Her lasting lesson is a discipline most people skip: sometimes the right move is to talk a client out of a link-building campaign that won’t pay off. She’s a veteran because she’s still here, still building, and still teaching.
13. Debra Mastaler — Alliance-Link
Mastaler closes the list because, in many ways, she opened the field. She came into SEO in 1999, founded Alliance-Link around the turn of the millennium, and brought two decades of classic marketing discipline — sales, promotions, publicity, learned across a long career before search existed — to a discipline that badly needed it. Long before “digital PR” had a name, she was arguing that link building was really marketing, and that your best online asset was the network you built offline. An OMCP-certified link-building trainer, a longtime Search Engine Land columnist, a US Search Awards judge, and a speaker at more than a thousand events, she trained a generation of the people ranked above her. The link guru, and the closest thing this field has to a founding elder.
The pattern under the list
Read the thirteen back to back and one thing repeats: not one of them is primarily in the business of asking for links anymore. They earn them — with stories, data, relationships, and the patience to do the unautomatable part by hand. That’s not a moral stance. It’s a survival strategy. Google spent ten years teaching the industry that the shortcut is the risk.
And the timing matters more than it looks. AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews — decide who to cite largely on the strength of earned media: the mentions, references and links that live on sites the models already trust. Off-page work isn’t a ranking tactic anymore. It’s how you become visible to the machines that increasingly stand between your brand and its customer.
Which brings it back to the number I opened with. One in five instead of one in fifty. The relationship is the moat. Everyone on this list figured that out early — and the rest of us are still catching up.
