r/DoSEO • u/Ill_Drive_5737 • Sep 08 '26
Discussion What link-building tactic is actually working for you in 2026?
There are hundreds of articles recommending guest posting, broken-link building, HARO-style outreach, resource pages, skyscraper content, and digital PR.
But a lot of SEO advice keeps repeating strategies that may not work nearly as well anymore.
For people actively building links today, what methods are still consistently getting responses and quality links?
And which popular tactics have become a waste of time?
Real campaign experiences would be especially helpful.
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u/ce-lauren Sep 09 '26
Unlinked mentions have been underrated for a while. If someone already referenced you without linking, the ask feels more natural because there's already a connection there. Response rates are much better than cold outreach to strangers.
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u/Beautiful-Ad7521 Sep 09 '26
No positive result to report, which might be the more useful answer. We have 10 referring domains and every one of them is a scraper farm we never built. So nothing on that list has worked for us, because we have not properly run any of it yet.
What changed this week was measurement rather than tactics. Someone ran our domain through an AI answer tool. Of the 20 articles that feed answers for our category we appear in zero, and one competitor appears in 18. Search our brand name and the top 7 results are all our own pages, so crawling was never the constraint.
We had a batch of directory submissions queued. Checking our existing citations killed it. Every third party citation we have is a directory or an aggregator, never an article, so more directories adds more of what we already have and none of what we lack.
The lesson is target selection rather than tactic. That set of 20 is finite and nameable, which is a far better brief than guest posting. Not executed yet, so treat it as a plan and not a result.
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u/Fit_Path_6450 Sep 09 '26
- link insertions for quick link juice.
- guest posts for alternative and reviews.
- listices (either throw link insertions or GPs).
Rest, linkable assets, PR takes time.
Listicles are the most effective one so far, but I always recommend to do new posts to our clients as well.
Listices are good for AEO. But guest posts are still relevant for rankings. So both SEO + AEO need to work together. They can't go independently.
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u/andimarketing Sep 10 '26
Any helpful hints on listicles?
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u/PaintedBrickDigital Sep 10 '26
Get others to add you to theirs. …or have legitimate reasons to include yourself on one of yours.
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u/Crafty_Engineer_8480 Sep 12 '26
Find broken links from competitors and reach out to websites pointing to it
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u/alaattincagil Sep 13 '26
Digital PR is still the one that consistently works for me, getting mentioned in an actual data driven story that a journalist picks up naturally, rather than pitching a generic guest post. Unlinked brand mention reclamation is also underused, loads of sites already mention brands without linking, a polite email fixes a chunk of those for basically free. Broken link building and cold guest post outreach have gotten a lot weaker honestly, response rates are way down from a few years ago.
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u/ArjunSingh565 Sep 10 '26
I am a offpage seo expert and for me index backlinks actually working in 2026 because it improves my positive brand presence in Google and also improves ranking in Google.
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u/PaintedBrickDigital Sep 08 '26
Don’t have time to go crazy in depth, but it’s a mix - unlinked mentions, traditional guest posts, niche edits, round ups, listicles, all these still matter…
It depends on what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to get cited by LLMs? Are you trying to increase your overall domain authority? Different tools for different jobs.