While SEO professionals understand hundreds of factors play a role in Google’s ranking algorithm, almost three-fourths (72 percent) believe backlinks are a significant ranking factor, according to a new survey conducted by Link-Assistant.com.

The study, conducted among attendees of SMX Advanced 2017, a popular SEO industry event, polled 628 SEO professionals about their link building strategies, budgets and challenges. The respondents represented both digital agencies and in-house teams of different caliber.

Only 6 percent of respondents reported receiving a link-building penalty over the past 12 months, with manual actions mentioned a little less frequently than Penguin. However, penalized individuals said manual actions were easier to recover from than those imposed by Penguin.

According to Link-Assistant.com co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Aleh Barysevich, in order to avoid penalties, link profiles must grow at a “natural pace,” but determining what is “natural” varies from entity to entity. Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents (73 percent) said they build up to 20 backlinks per website per month, and 68 percent said they spend less than $1,000 monthly doing so.

“Overall, SEOs seem to have become more discreet in their link building efforts,” Barysevich said. “Thus, the cases of actual penalties have become very rare. Also, in most cases SEOs managed to recover their rankings afterwards, which means being penalized is definitely painful; however it is not a death sentence to your business.”

Regardless the size of the business, all SEO professionals mentioned the same challenges: dealing with “boring” industries, lack of opportunities for link placement, low response rate from potential link partners, personal lack of experience with the material and the high cost of fee-based links.

Twenty-three link-growing techniques, grouped into seven categories, were addressed by the survey: creating original content (infographics, whitepapers, webinars, videos, etc.), PR-based methods (press releases, interviews, etc.), outreach (link reclamation, broken link building), social media (content-sharing, viral campaigns, etc.), local-focused efforts (local press, chambers of commerce, etc.), community-driven tactics (blog comments, forums, Q&A sites) and miscellaneous tactics (guest blogging, paying for reviews and articles with and without disclosure). Of those, creating original content and social media outreach were the most popular with SEO professionals.