Brian Dean

Brian Dean left a Ph.D. programme, started publishing SEO case studies, and ended up building Backlinko into one of the most-linked sites in the industry. It was later acquired by Semrush.

The Skyscraper Technique

The framework is simple enough to explain in a sentence — 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.

It has been criticised for producing bloated content, and Dean himself has evolved the approach since. But the phrase entered the working vocabulary of the industry, which very few tactics manage.

The Backlinko format

Backlinko posts were unusually long, heavily screenshotted and built around a single documented result. That format is now standard across SEO publishing, largely because Backlinko demonstrated it worked.