The Skyscraper Technique
The framework itself is simple: find the best-performing content on a topic, build something meaningfully better, then approach the people already linking to the original. Its influence came from the packaging. It gave teams a repeatable, teachable process at a moment when link building was still mostly improvised. The phrase entered the working vocabulary of the industry — a rare achievement for any tactic.
It has been criticised for producing bloated content, and Dean has evolved the approach in his own work since. But it is still the entry point most in-house teams learn link building through.
The Backlinko format
Backlinko posts were unusually long, heavily screenshotted, structured around a single documented result. That format is now standard across SEO publishing, largely because Backlinko proved it worked.