Sarah, a digital marketing manager at a B2B SaaS company, ran what she thought was an aggressive link building campaign three years ago. Five hundred backlinks purchased from a bulk provider. Exact-match anchor text across dozens of directories. Rankings were supposed to soar.
Within six weeks, organic traffic dropped 35 percent. Recovery took eight months.
The reason is not mysterious. Google's algorithm has become sophisticated enough to detect not just the presence of unnatural links but the patterns that indicate they were acquired artificially. Velocity that does not match organic growth. Anchor text distributions that look like someone optimised them rather than used them naturally. Links from sites with no organic traffic of their own. The signals compound quickly, and the penalties are real.
But the lesson from that story is not that link building does not work. It is that the wrong kind of link building is now actively harmful, which makes understanding the difference between what earns authority and what destroys it more important than ever.
The link profile that ranks well in 2026 looks like it was built by a site that other people in the field genuinely reference and recommend. That description is both a clue to the strategy and an honest summary of the bar you are trying to meet.
Why Links Still Matter
Before the tactics, the question is worth answering directly. Given how much Google has emphasised content quality, E-E-A-T, and topical authority over the past two years, do backlinks still matter?
Yes, meaningfully. Top-ranking pages earn roughly 3.8 times more backlinks than lower-ranking pages, according to analysis across millions of results. The correlation between strong backlink profiles and competitive rankings remains one of the most consistent findings in SEO research. What has changed is not that links matter, but that the quality threshold has risen so high that a small number of excellent links outweigh a large number of mediocre ones.
The underlying logic makes sense. A link from a publication that editorially controls what it links to, has an engaged audience in your space, and publishes content other people genuinely read is a meaningful signal of credibility. That publication decided your content was worth referencing. That editorial judgment carries weight with Google's systems.
A link from a directory that accepts any submission, has no organic traffic, and exists specifically to provide links is the opposite signal. It suggests someone was willing to pay or trade for the link, not that anyone editorially decided your content deserved to be referenced. Google has gotten very good at telling these apart.
The practical implication: the time you would spend building 50 low-quality links is better spent building 3 high-quality ones. The SEO value is higher, the penalty risk is lower, and the referral traffic you get from links on sites real people actually read is a genuine bonus.
What Is Dead and Why
Link schemes that reliably worked in 2015 are either ineffective or actively dangerous today.
Paid links from link marketplaces remain a manual action risk. Google's Webspam team actively investigates obvious link trading, and the pattern of links from sites that have suddenly shifted their content to accommodate paid placement is detectable algorithmically. The risk-reward calculation has inverted: the short-term ranking boost rarely lasts long enough to justify the recovery time if you are caught.
Private blog networks, PBNs, are essentially finished as a competitive tool for sites that intend to survive long-term. Google's ability to fingerprint hosting patterns, IP relationships, writing styles, and cross-linking networks has matured to the point where sophisticated PBNs get deindexed regularly. The ones still operating are mostly serving clients who have not noticed they stopped working.
Link exchanges and reciprocal linking schemes look exactly like what they are in Google's link graph. A reasonable number of reciprocal links between genuinely related sites in the same industry is normal and expected. A systematic pattern of A links to B links to A across dozens of domains is a manipulative link scheme, regardless of how it is framed.
Exact-match anchor text concentration is one of the clearest signals of artificial link building. When your backlink profile shows 40 percent of links using your target keyword phrase as anchor text, no organic link building campaign produces that pattern. Natural anchor text is diverse: brand name, domain, generic phrases, partial match, topic-relevant, and a mix of everything else. Optimising your anchor text distribution is link profile manipulation and has been detectable for years.
Guest posting on sites that exist to publish guest posts has diminished significantly in value. When a site publishes 50 guest posts a month from anonymous contributors on unrelated topics, its editorial judgment is clearly not meaningful, and Google treats its links accordingly. The sites still valuable for guest posting are ones with genuine editorial standards, real audiences, and a track record of publishing quality content regardless of who wrote it.
What Still Works: The Hierarchy of Value
Digital PR has emerged as the highest-value link building approach in 2026 because it is genuinely not link building. It is creating content or stories that earn editorial coverage from publications that write about real things, and the links follow naturally from being worth writing about.
Original research is the clearest example. A company that surveys 1,000 practitioners in its field and publishes findings has created something inherently newsworthy. Journalists covering that industry need data and analysis, and a properly structured research report gives them citable figures. Original research receives roughly eight times more backlinks on average than opinion or curated content, and the gap widened as AI-generated content flooded the web with content that cannot conduct original research because it did not go and do the thing.
The research does not need to be expensive. A survey of 200 customers or practitioners using a tool like Typeform produces data that no one else has. Analysis of publicly available data with a meaningful insight extracts novelty from existing information. An annual benchmark report that you commit to updating becomes a reference that others cite year over year.
Beyond original research, the news hook approach positions your company's perspective on breaking industry events. When a major platform announces a product change, when regulation passes that affects your industry, when public data is released that your expertise lets you interpret meaningfully, a well-positioned commentary piece pitched to relevant journalists has a reasonable chance of placement. The difference from sending generic press releases is that you are providing genuine analysis, not a corporate statement.
Data storytelling, combining your internal data with compelling visualisation, attracts links because it offers something editors and bloggers can embed and reference without doing their own analysis. A well-executed infographic or interactive data visualisation on a topic people in your space care about is a linkable asset with a long shelf life.
HARO Is Gone. Here Is What Replaced It.
Help a Reporter Out, HARO, was for years the most efficient way for brands and practitioners to earn editorial links from mainstream media. Its shutdown by Cision in late 2024 created a meaningful gap in the media outreach ecosystem. The platform had significant issues in its final years, most queries became irrelevant, AI-generated pitches flooded journalist inboxes, and placement rates dropped sharply. But it worked for people who used it well.
Several platforms have emerged to fill this space, and each serves a different need.
Source of Sources was founded by Peter Shankman, who also created HARO, and closely mirrors what the original platform did best. It sends journalist queries three times daily via email, focusing on quality over volume. It is still growing, but the signal-to-noise ratio is better than late-era HARO.
Featured, formerly Terkel, takes a curated approach that connects subject-matter experts directly with publishers for content creation and media coverage. It has proven particularly strong for B2B sectors including marketing, finance, HR, and technology, and its vetting process means journalists using it receive fewer irrelevant pitches. The faster turnaround time is a practical advantage: Featured's average from pitch to publication is around 18 days.
Qwoted focuses on quality and vetting rigour, with a strong preference for PR agency relationships and a reputation for connecting with top-tier publications. The higher barrier to entry means less competition and better conversion rates on the pitches that do get sent.
Help a B2B Writer fills the specific gap for business, software, and marketing content, connecting writers at major B2B publications directly with subject-matter experts. Because every query is inherently relevant to B2B topics, the noise problem that killed HARO is largely absent.
The approach that works across all of these platforms is the same: be faster than the competition, pitch with genuine expertise rather than generic talking points, be specific and quotable rather than corporate and vague, and build relationships with journalists beyond individual queries. Pitching within six hours of a query posting improves conversion rates by around 20 percent. The journalist who gets ten pitches in the first hour wants a different kind of pitch than the journalist who gets generic responses days later.
Broken Link Building: Still Effective, Now More Deliberate
Broken link building works because it is genuinely helpful. You identify a dead link on a relevant, high-quality site, create better content than whatever used to be there, and suggest your content as the replacement. You are solving a problem for the site owner, not just asking for a favour.
The version that works in 2026 is more deliberate than the version that worked in 2018. Finding a single broken link and emailing immediately is low-yield. The higher-yield approach is finding a pattern: a set of sites in your niche where external links to old resources have rotted as the web has changed, creating multiple replacement opportunities at once. A practitioner who found 25 resource pages in the marketing niche with broken links to old SEO tools, created a free SEO audit tool as the replacement, and reached out to all 25, got links from seven of them, achieved a 28 percent conversion rate with zero spend.
Tools including Ahrefs' Broken Backlinks report and Screaming Frog make finding these opportunities systematic rather than accidental. The time investment is front-loaded in the audit, and once you have a replacement resource worth linking to, the outreach becomes efficient.
Guest Posting: The Standard Has Risen
Guest posting on genuinely relevant, high-quality publications with real editorial standards still produces valuable links and meaningful referral traffic. What has changed is that the bar for what "high quality" means is considerably higher than it was, and the bar for what constitutes a pitch worth accepting is correspondingly higher.
The sites worth pitching are ones where the editorial team would decline your pitch if it were not good enough. If a site accepts everything, the link value has largely been diluted. If they turn down a significant portion of pitches, placement in their publication carries editorial credibility.
The pitch that works provides a specific, original angle the publication has not covered, written by someone with genuine credentials in the area, for an audience the publication actually serves. Generic pitches using templates that clearly have not engaged with what the publication actually covers are identified and deleted immediately by editors who receive dozens per week.
The bio link matters less than the contextual link within the body of the piece. A relevant, editorially natural link to a specific resource on your site carries more authority and more lasting value than an author bio link, which many publications nofollow anyway.
One good piece on one genuinely relevant, quality publication produces more value than five mediocre pieces on sites with no real audience. The time that would go into those five mediocre pitches is better invested in making the one excellent pitch excellent.
Consistency Beats Intensity
The link building trap is treating it as an activity you do in bursts. Run a campaign for three months, build some links, move on, repeat in six months. This produces an unnatural velocity pattern that looks like what it is: a campaign, not organic growth.
Sustainable link profiles are built through consistent, ongoing activity. Five quality links per month built consistently over a year produces a better, more natural-looking profile than 30 links in one month and nothing for the rest of the year. The compound interest metaphor is appropriate: early efforts create the foundation that subsequent efforts build on, and the cumulative effect grows faster than any single campaign.
The practical implication is treating link building as an ongoing programme rather than a project. Allocate consistent time each month to media outreach, content asset creation, and relationship building. Track velocity over rolling periods rather than by campaign. Set a realistic monthly target based on your resources, aim to hit it consistently, and resist the temptation to either sprint unsustainably or treat link building as something you will get back to eventually.
The sites with the strongest link profiles in competitive niches almost never got there through a single campaign. They built consistently, improved their content quality over time, created increasingly distinctive assets worth referencing, and made link acquisition a permanent function rather than an occasional initiative.
Tracking which content is actually earning links, identifying opportunities in your competitors' profiles, and monitoring anchor text distribution requires more than checking your domain rating monthly. ClickHub's link profile view gives you the visibility to make link building decisions based on what is actually happening in your account, not just how you think it should look.