Brian Dean coined the skyscraper technique in 2013. The pitch was elegant: find content with lots of backlinks, create something better, email people who linked to the original, and watch links flow to your superior version.
Eleven years later, the technique still works. It also fails constantly. The difference isn’t luck—it’s execution quality and honest assessment of what “better” actually means.
A Nashville healthcare marketing agency tested this on a competitor’s “patient engagement statistics” post that had accumulated 89 backlinks over four years. They created a version with 2024 data (the original used 2019 numbers), interactive visualizations, and downloadable report formats. Six months of targeted outreach produced 31 links from sites that had linked to the original, plus 19 from new sources who found the resource through those initial links.
But here’s what they don’t mention in the success stories: that same agency attempted skyscraper on three other pieces that year. Total links from those three combined: four. One worked spectacularly. Three barely moved the needle.
That’s the real skyscraper experience. When it works, it works well. When it doesn’t, you’ve invested significant resources for minimal return. The skill is in identifying which opportunities are which before you commit.
The Honest Framework
The technique has three steps. Each is harder than it sounds.
Step 1: Find Content Worth Beating
You’re looking for content that has attracted meaningful backlinks from sites you’d want links from. Not just any linked content—content where those links represent genuine editorial decisions from relevant, authoritative sources.
What makes a good target:
The link profile is real. A post with 200 backlinks from irrelevant directories, spam sites, and link schemes isn’t a target—it’s a warning. You want content where the links come from industry publications, legitimate blogs, and editorial mentions. Check the actual linking sites, not just the count.
The content has visible weaknesses. Exceptional content is hard to beat. You want content that ranks and has links despite problems: outdated information, thin coverage, poor presentation, missing important angles. These weaknesses become your improvement opportunities.
The topic matters to you. Building links to content about topics irrelevant to your business wastes resources. The skyscraper piece should serve your broader content strategy and eventually drive traffic and conversions you care about.
The topic attracts natural linking. Some subjects earn links. Original research, comprehensive guides, useful tools, definitive resources—these formats earn editorial links. Product reviews, opinion pieces, and news commentary rarely do, regardless of quality.
Finding targets in practice:
Use Ahrefs or Semrush to search your topic area by referring domains. Sort by links to find what’s earned the most.
Analyze your competitors’ most-linked content. What’s earned them links? These represent validated linking topics in your space.
Search for “ultimate guide,” “complete guide,” “statistics,” and “data” in your industry. These formats typically attract links and often have room for improvement.
Nashville example:
A Nashville commercial real estate firm wanted links to build domain authority. They searched “[city] commercial real estate statistics” across major markets and found that most “commercial real estate statistics” posts were:
- Using data from 2021 or earlier
- Missing Nashville-specific data entirely
- Heavy on national trends, light on actionable local insights
- Poorly visualized—just walls of numbers
That’s a target. Weakness everywhere. Improvement obvious.
Step 2: Create Something Demonstrably Better
This is where most skyscraper attempts die. “Better” is subjective, and most people overestimate how much better their content actually is.
The uncomfortable question:
If you’d linked to the original, would you update your link to yours? Not “might you consider it.” Would you actually go back to an old post, edit it, and change the link?
That’s a high bar. Most content improvements don’t clear it.
What actually constitutes “better”:
Comprehensiveness that fills real gaps. Not just longer—more complete. The original covers five aspects; you cover eight, including three the original missed that are important to the audience. This is verifiable improvement.
Currency when the original is outdated. A post citing 2019 statistics in 2025 is demonstrably inferior to one with 2024 data. But “updated for 2025” slapped on minor tweaks isn’t enough. The update needs to be substantial.
Original data when the original uses secondary sources. The original quotes industry reports. You conduct original research with proprietary data. That’s definitively different and more valuable.
Dramatically better presentation. The original is a wall of text. You have clear structure, visual elements, interactive components, and downloadable resources. Same information, radically better experience.
Practical utility the original lacks. The original explains concepts. You provide templates, calculators, checklists, or tools. Your content lets people do something, not just learn something.
What doesn’t count as “better”:
Longer without being more valuable. Adding 2,000 words of filler to a 2,000-word piece doesn’t make it better. It makes it longer.
Marginally updated. Changing three statistics and claiming “2025 update” doesn’t justify link replacement. The improvement needs to be obvious and significant.
Design-only improvements. Better graphics without better content isn’t a compelling reason to switch links. Visual improvement supports content improvement but can’t substitute for it.
Reorganized but not enhanced. Different structure with the same information isn’t better—it’s just different.
The Nashville commercial real estate example continued:
Their skyscraper version included:
- Original survey data from 200+ Nashville commercial property managers (nothing else had this)
- Submarket-by-submarket breakdown (downtown, Gulch, East Nashville, Berry Hill, etc.)
- Interactive map visualization
- Year-over-year comparison with specific properties
- Quarterly update commitment (and they actually kept it)
This wasn’t marginally better. It was definitively better in ways that would be obvious to anyone linking to a commercial real estate statistics resource.
Step 3: Outreach That Respects Reality
You have genuinely superior content. Now you email people who linked to the original. This is where the technique meets cold, hard response rate reality.
Building your list:
Export backlinks from the target content. Most will be unusable: dead sites, irrelevant pages, no-reply contacts. Filter ruthlessly.
Quality indicators: domain authority above 30, relevance to your topic, actual editorial content (not directories or aggregators), recent activity suggesting the site is maintained.
Find contact information. The person who wrote the article with the link is better than a generic info@ address. Tools like Hunter.io help, but manual verification improves accuracy.
Realistic list size: if the original has 100 backlinks, you might end up with 30-40 contactable, relevant prospects after filtering.
Outreach that works:
Your email needs to accomplish three things in 100 words or less: establish that you’re relevant (not a random spammer), explain specifically why your content is better (not just “it’s great”), and make updating easy (direct link, clear value proposition).
What this looks like:
Subject: Updated resource for your [topic] article
Hi [Name],
Your article on [specific article] references [original content] for [topic] statistics. That piece uses 2019 data.
We just published [your content] with 2024 data, including original research from [specific source] and [specific feature that original lacks].
Might be worth a look if you’re updating that piece.
[Your name]
That’s it. No flattery. No lengthy introduction. No “I loved your article” when you clearly just scraped their link.
Realistic expectations:
Response rates for cold outreach typically run 5-15%. Link placement rates are lower. If you contact 50 qualified prospects and get 3-7 links, that’s a successful campaign.
Many people won’t respond. Some will respond positively but never update. Some will update but link to a different resource. Some will decline. This is normal. It’s not failure—it’s the math of cold outreach.
Follow-up:
One follow-up after 5-7 days is appropriate. It should add value or context, not just repeat the ask. “I should mention we also added [specific feature] that might be relevant” gives a reason to re-engage.
Two follow-ups maximum. Beyond that, you’re pestering people.
When Skyscraper Works
The technique succeeds under specific conditions:
Information-dense topics. Statistics, data, research, comprehensive guides—topics where “better” is measurable. More complete, more current, more accurate. These create clear improvement opportunities.
Outdated but still-linked content. Content from 2018 still attracting links in 2025 because nothing better exists. The original succeeded; it just hasn’t been updated. Your updated version has a clear value proposition.
Topics with active linking communities. Industries where bloggers, journalists, and content creators regularly seek and cite resources. B2B, technology, finance, healthcare—these have ecosystems where people actively look for sources to reference.
Formats that earn editorial links. Original research, data visualizations, comprehensive guides, useful tools. These formats earn links through genuine utility. Product comparisons, opinion pieces, and news commentary rarely justify outreach regardless of quality.
When Skyscraper Fails
Saturated techniques. In competitive SEO spaces, the “ultimate guide to [topic]” has been skyscrapered repeatedly. You’re not beating one piece—you’re competing against a decade of attempted improvements. Differentiation becomes exponentially harder.
Topics that don’t earn natural links. Some subjects just don’t attract editorial linking, regardless of content quality. Local service content, B2C consumer topics, and commoditized information rarely earn links through quality alone.
Authority gaps that content can’t overcome. If the original sits on a site with DA 80 and yours is DA 25, being better might not matter. Authority advantages compound over time. A genuinely superior resource on a much weaker domain might still lose.
Insufficient improvement. The most common failure mode. Content that’s slightly better isn’t enough. The improvement needs to be obvious, significant, and relevant to the linker’s audience. Marginal improvements don’t justify the effort of updating old content.
Weak outreach execution. Good content with bad outreach produces bad results. Generic templates, poor targeting, wrong contacts, excessive pitches—all kill response rates regardless of content quality.
The Economics
Skyscraper requires significant investment. Understanding the economics determines whether it’s right for your situation.
Content creation costs:
A genuine skyscraper piece isn’t a blog post. Research, writing, design, visualization, possibly original data collection—figure 40-80 hours of work for a serious attempt. At loaded labor costs, that’s potentially $3,000-8,000 in time.
Outreach costs:
Building lists, verifying contacts, personalizing emails, managing follow-ups, tracking responses—add another 20-40 hours. Plus any tool costs for email finding and link analysis.
Total investment:
A real skyscraper campaign might cost $5,000-15,000 in time and resources. That’s not trivial.
Return calculation:
If that campaign produces 15 links averaging DA 45, you’ve acquired links at roughly $500-1,000 each. Is that competitive with alternatives in your space?
In high-competition spaces where individual links might cost $500+ through any method, skyscraper can be competitive. In lower-competition spaces where links are easier to earn through other methods, the economics might not work.
The Nashville healthcare example revisited:
Their successful campaign produced 50 links (31 from original linkers, 19 organic) over 18 months. Content cost roughly $6,000 to create (including original survey). Outreach took about 40 hours over 6 months. Total investment: approximately $10,000.
Cost per link: $200.
For their space (healthcare marketing, competitive for links), that was significantly better than alternatives. The three failed attempts that year? Roughly $15,000 total for 4 links. Ouch.
That’s the skyscraper reality: home runs subsidize strikeouts. You need to pick targets well enough that the wins outweigh the losses.
Decision Framework
Before committing to skyscraper, honestly answer:
Is the target content actually beatable?
Not “could someone beat it” but “can we, specifically, create something definitively better?” If you lack the expertise, data access, or resources to genuinely outperform the original, choose a different target.
Is the improvement significant enough?
Would you update your link if you’d linked to the original? If you hesitate, the improvement probably isn’t sufficient. Either increase your planned improvement or choose a different target.
Are the linkers reachable and relevant?
Analyze who actually linked to the original. Are they contactable? Relevant to your business? Active and maintaining their content? If the link profile is mostly dead sites and spam, outreach will fail regardless of content quality.
Do the economics work?
Given realistic response rates (5-15%) and your estimated costs, what’s your likely cost per link? How does that compare to alternatives in your space?
Does this fit your broader strategy?
Skyscraper works best as part of a diversified link building approach, not as the entire strategy. If you’re putting all your link building eggs in the skyscraper basket, reconsider.
What Happens After
Successful skyscraper content often earns links beyond the initial outreach. The content exists, it’s genuinely good, and people find it.
Continued promotion:
The outreach list isn’t exhaustive. New content gets published linking to resources on your topic. New sites emerge in your space. The skyscraper piece can be the resource you point people to across ongoing PR, guest posting, and relationship building.
Content maintenance:
Skyscraper content should stay current. If your advantage is having 2024 data, that advantage evaporates when it’s 2026 and you’re still showing 2024 numbers. Budget for updates.
Internal linking:
Link your other content to the skyscraper piece. If it’s earning external authority, distribute that authority to other important pages through internal linking.
Compounding returns:
High-authority content earns links passively over time. The initial outreach gets you started; ongoing organic discovery keeps the links flowing. A successful skyscraper piece should continue earning links years after the initial campaign ends.
Resources
- Backlinko (original skyscraper technique): https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique
- Ahrefs Content Explorer: https://ahrefs.com/content-explorer
- Hunter.io for email finding: https://hunter.io/
- Semrush Backlink Analytics: https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/
Outreach response rates and link acquisition costs vary significantly by industry, content quality, and execution. The figures cited represent common patterns but individual results differ. The technique has become more competitive since its popularization—realistic expectations are essential.