Resolve's Michael Johnson explained which link building tactics to retire, how to earn relevant coverage, and how to plan off-page SEO and AI visibility work.

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.

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.

“These are third-party metrics. They’re not Google signals, and they’re easy to inflate.”

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.

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