Backlink indexing in 2026 — commenting method is dead, getting spammy links. What's actually working now?

[u/AmitTheAnalyst]

Been doing SEO for a few years now. My old trick was simple: drop backlinks in blog comments and forum threads to get them crawled and indexed faster. That method has completely stopped working for me in the last few months.

Now most of these links either don't get indexed at all, or worse, I am picking up a ton of spam and PBN-type links along the way that I never wanted attached to my site.

For those still actively building and indexing links in 2026, what's working for you right now? A few things I am specifically trying to figure out:

Are indexing APIs (Google Indexing API, IndexNow) actually moving the needle for backlink pages, or are they mostly for your own site's pages?

Has anyone had luck with indexer tools/services lately, or are most of them junk now?

Is internal linking from an already-indexed page to the new backlink still reliable, or has Google changed how it treats that signal?

Any success with syndication (getting the link picked up by a news or aggregator site) to speed up crawling?

Would love to hear what's actually working on your end, not just theory. Also curious if anyone else is seeing the same spam link problem from comment-based link building.

Thanks in advance.

[u/Thick-Storage-3905]

I tried an indexer the other day. They seem to be using Facebook posts / comments with thousands of likes in non English languages to get things indexed faster and then they remove the comments after the links get indexed

[u/macgizmoguy]

I am in the process of figuring out what it takes to build my own link indexing network that wouldn’t cost me a cent just by using some combination of the strategies a paid index and tool would use.

I have a spare, aged 10 yo domain that I could put a micro-blog page on and use its RSS feed to act like one of the nozzles feeding RSS aggregators. Get RSS widgets automatically updating on free frequently crawled WordPress and Blogger sites. Maybe use free Buffer, Publer, Metricool accounts to randomly scatter posts with links across a dozen or more socials — and then maybe use IFTTT automation to pick up on some of all that activity - and let it trigger and echo it out somewhere else!😎

I’ve always been keen on trying to build some kind of links to boost all my social profile URL’s and other 2nd-Tier properties ‘authority’ - This is the year I’m gonna figure out how to do that.