Link Building Strategies That Actually Work in 2026

I’ve built links for 850+ clients over the past 18 years. Most of what you read about link building online is recycled advice from 2019 that doesn’t work anymore. Some of it never worked. I’m going to share the strategies I actually use on client campaigns right now, in 2026, with real numbers and honest opinions about what’s worth your time.

Here’s what I know for sure: links still move the needle more than any other off-page factor. Google’s algorithm has changed a lot since I started, but the core logic hasn’t. Sites with strong, relevant backlinks outrank sites without them. The difference in 2026 is that quality matters more than ever, and the old spray-and-pray outreach approach is dead.

Let me walk you through 10 strategies I use regularly, ranked roughly by how effective they are right now.

Broken Link Building

This is one of the oldest strategies in the book, and it still works. The concept is simple: you find broken links on authority sites, create content that replaces the dead resource, and ask the site owner to swap the broken link for yours. You’re doing them a favor by fixing their site while earning a link.

How to Find Broken Links on Authority Sites

I use Ahrefs for this. Go to Content Explorer, search for your topic, and filter by sites with high Domain Rating (DR 40+). Then run those URLs through Site Explorer and check the “Best by Links” report filtered to 404 pages. You’ll find pages that used to attract dozens of links but are now dead. That’s your opportunity.

The Chrome extension “Check My Links” is also useful when you’re manually browsing resource pages. It highlights every broken link on a page in red. I’ll sometimes spend 30 minutes browsing competitor resource pages with this extension running and find 5 to 10 broken link opportunities in a single session.

Outreach That Gets Responses

Your outreach email needs to be short and helpful. Don’t write a 500-word pitch about yourself. Here’s what works for me: subject line mentions their broken link, first sentence identifies the specific broken URL on their page, second sentence offers your replacement resource, and that’s it. Three to four sentences total.

I get about a 5 to 8% success rate with broken link building outreach. That means for every 100 emails I send, I land 5 to 8 links. It’s not glamorous, but when those links come from DR 50+ sites, the ROI is massive. One client in the SaaS space gained 23 links in a single quarter using only this strategy, and their organic traffic jumped 34%.

The Honest Downside

Broken link building is time-intensive. Finding quality broken links, creating replacement content, and sending outreach takes real effort. If you’re a solo operator, expect to spend 8 to 10 hours per week to run this at scale. I recommend it for anyone willing to put in consistent effort, but it’s not a quick win.

Resource Page Link Building

Resource pages are curated lists of helpful links on a specific topic. Universities, industry blogs, and government sites all maintain them. Getting listed on these pages can earn you high-authority links with minimal friction.

Finding the Right Resource Pages

Use Google search operators to find resource pages in your niche. Try searches like “your keyword” + “useful resources” or “your keyword” + “recommended links” or “your keyword” + intitle:”resources”. I’ve found that adding “site:.edu” or “site:.gov” to these searches surfaces the highest-quality opportunities.

Not every resource page is worth pursuing. I look for three things: the page has been updated in the last 12 months, it has at least DR 30, and it’s actually relevant to my content. A resource page about “digital marketing tools” won’t help you if your content is about WordPress hosting. Relevance beats authority every time.

Creating Content Worth Linking To

Here’s where most people fail. They find great resource pages but have nothing worth adding. You need a genuine resource, something like an in-depth guide, a free tool, a detailed tutorial, or original research. Blog posts with 800 words of generic advice won’t get added to anyone’s curated list.

I created a WordPress speed optimization guide for one client that took two weeks to produce. It included original test data from 15 different hosting providers. That single piece of content earned 47 resource page links over six months because it was genuinely the best resource available on the topic. The investment was significant, but the returns were 10x what any other strategy delivered.

Niche Edits and Link Insertions

Niche edits are links placed into existing, already-indexed content. Instead of getting a new article published, you’re getting your link added to a page that already ranks and has authority. This is one of the most effective strategies in 2026, and also one of the most misunderstood.

The Right Way to Do Niche Edits

There are two approaches: outreach-based and paid. I strongly recommend the outreach approach. You find relevant articles that mention your topic but don’t link to your resource, then you email the author and suggest adding your link as a helpful reference for their readers. It’s similar to broken link building but without needing a broken link as the entry point.

I target articles that rank on page one or two for related keywords. If someone wrote a guide about “WordPress security” and mentioned caching plugins without linking to a specific resource, I’ll reach out and suggest my client’s caching comparison guide. The success rate is lower than broken link building (about 3 to 5%), but the links you get are incredibly powerful because the pages already have established authority and traffic.

Paid Niche Edits: My Honest Take

Let me be direct: paid niche edits exist in a gray area. Buying links violates Google’s guidelines. I’ve seen clients come to me after spending thousands on paid niche edits from vendors, and some got results while others got penalized. The quality varies wildly. If you go this route, you’re accepting risk. I personally stick to outreach-based niche edits for my clients because the links are more sustainable and don’t carry penalty risk.

The sites selling niche edits often reuse the same network of blogs. Google’s spam detection has gotten significantly better in 2025 and 2026. I’ve watched several link networks get deindexed this year alone, taking all the links they sold with them. Not worth the gamble when outreach-based methods work.

Testimonial Link Building

This is the most underrated link building strategy I know. Almost every software company and service provider features customer testimonials on their website, and most of those testimonials include a link back to the customer’s site. You’re already using tools and services. Turn that into links.

How to Execute This at Scale

Make a list of every tool, plugin, hosting provider, and service you pay for. Then write a genuine testimonial for each one. I’m talking 3 to 5 sentences about your real experience with the product. Submit it through their website, or email their marketing team directly. Most companies are hungry for social proof and will happily feature your testimonial with a link.

I did this for a client who used 12 different SaaS tools. We wrote testimonials for all 12 and submitted them over two months. Nine of the twelve featured the testimonial with a dofollow link. That’s a 75% success rate with links from legitimate, high-authority company websites. Some of those sites had DR 70+. The entire process took maybe 6 hours of total work.

Picking the Right Products to Review

Focus on products where the company is actively collecting testimonials. Check their website for a testimonials page or a “wall of love” section. Newer companies and startups are especially receptive because they’re still building social proof. Enterprise companies tend to have slower processes and more requirements, so I prioritize mid-market SaaS products.

One tip that’s worked well for me: if you can include specific metrics in your testimonial (“This tool reduced our page load time by 62%”), companies are far more likely to feature it prominently. Numbers make testimonials more credible, and companies know this.

Event-Based Link Building

Events generate links naturally because they create something newsworthy. Whether you’re hosting a virtual summit, sponsoring a local meetup, or creating a scholarship, events attract mentions and links from attendees, sponsors, press, and community organizations.

Virtual Events and Webinars

Virtual events became mainstream during the pandemic, and they haven’t slowed down. Hosting a free webinar or virtual summit in your niche can earn you links from co-hosts, speakers, industry publications that cover the event, and attendees who write about what they learned. I ran a virtual WordPress performance summit for a client in late 2025 that attracted 14 speakers and generated 38 backlinks from speaker bios, event listings, and recap articles.

The key is making the event genuinely valuable. Nobody links to a thinly disguised sales pitch. Bring in real experts, cover topics your audience cares about, and make the recordings freely available afterward. The content continues to attract links long after the live event ends.

Scholarship Link Building in 2026

I need to be honest here: scholarship link building has been heavily abused and is less effective than it was three years ago. Google caught on to the pattern of businesses creating fake scholarships purely for .edu links. That said, if you create a legitimate scholarship with real money behind it and a genuine application process, it still works. I’ve seen clients earn 15 to 20 .edu links from a $1,000 annual scholarship.

The difference between a legitimate scholarship and a spammy one is obvious. Real scholarships have real winners, actual application requirements, and meaningful award amounts. If you’re offering a $250 scholarship with no real selection process, universities will see through it. I only recommend this strategy to clients who are genuinely willing to invest in supporting students.

Conference and Meetup Sponsorships

Sponsoring industry conferences and local meetups is a reliable way to earn links from event websites, press coverage, and attendee blogs. I typically recommend sponsoring 3 to 4 events per year in your industry. The cost ranges from $500 for a local meetup sponsorship to $5,000+ for a major conference, but the links are high quality and come with real brand exposure.

The sponsorship approach also opens doors for speaker opportunities. When I speak at WordCamps or SEO conferences, the event pages link to my site, attendees mention me in their write-ups, and I build relationships that lead to more link opportunities down the road. The compounding effect is significant.

Wikipedia Link Building

Wikipedia links are nofollow, so they don’t pass direct PageRank. But they drive referral traffic, build credibility, and can indirectly improve your SEO because Google uses Wikipedia as a trust signal. I include this strategy because it’s worked well for several clients when done correctly.

Finding Citation Opportunities

Wikipedia editors are constantly flagging articles that need citations. Search for “[your topic] site:wikipedia.org” and look for articles with “citation needed” tags. If you have original research, data, or a thorough resource that could serve as a citation, you can add it. The key is that your source must be genuinely authoritative and not self-promotional.

I helped a client in the cybersecurity space get their annual threat report cited on three Wikipedia articles. The referral traffic from those citations averages about 800 visits per month, and the brand authority boost is hard to quantify but real. Their CEO gets recognized at conferences partly because people see their company cited on Wikipedia.

Rules You Must Follow

Wikipedia has strict editing guidelines, and violating them will get your edits reverted and your account flagged. Never edit an article to add a link to your own company. Use a neutral tone. Only add citations that genuinely improve the article. And don’t create a new account just to add one link. Build editing credibility first by making helpful edits to unrelated articles.

I’ve seen companies hire Wikipedia editors to manipulate pages, and it almost always backfires. The Wikipedia community is incredibly vigilant about detecting promotional editing. Play the long game here. Build a legitimate editing history, contribute genuinely useful citations, and the results will follow.

Digital PR for Link Building

Digital PR is the strategy I’m most bullish on in 2026. Creating newsworthy content, original research, and data-driven studies that journalists want to cover is the most scalable way to earn high-authority links. It’s also the most difficult, which is why most people avoid it.

Creating Data-Driven Content

Journalists need data for their stories. If you can provide original research, survey results, or unique data analysis, you become a source they return to repeatedly. I invested $2,000 in a survey of 1,500 small business owners about their SEO spending habits for a client last year. That study was cited by 67 publications including Forbes, Search Engine Journal, and HubSpot. It earned over 90 backlinks in four months.

The content doesn’t have to be expensive, though. One of my most successful digital PR pieces was a simple analysis of 10,000 Google Search Console queries that I compiled into a trends report. It cost nothing but time and earned 31 links from industry blogs.

HARO Is Dead, But Alternatives Exist

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) shut down, and the replacement Connectively didn’t last long either. But journalist outreach is alive and well. In 2026, I use platforms like Qwoted, SourceBottle, and direct Twitter/X outreach to journalists covering my clients’ industries. I also monitor hashtags like #journorequest and #prrequest.

The response rate on journalist queries is about 10 to 15% when you provide genuinely expert commentary with specific data points. Generic responses get ignored. When a journalist asks about SEO trends, I don’t send a vague statement. I send specific data: “Across my 850+ client portfolio, I’ve seen a 23% increase in AI-generated content penalties since March 2026.” That kind of specificity gets you quoted and linked.

The Skyscraper Technique

Brian Dean popularized this strategy years ago, and the core concept still works. Find content that’s already earning links, create something significantly better, and reach out to everyone linking to the original piece. But the bar for “significantly better” has risen dramatically in 2026.

What “Better” Means Now

In 2018, you could take a “50 SEO Tips” article, expand it to “100 SEO Tips,” and call it better. That doesn’t work anymore. Better in 2026 means more original data, better design, more practical examples, and a perspective that can’t be replicated by AI. Your skyscraper content needs to include something that required actual expertise to create.

I recently helped a client skyscraper a competitor’s WordPress migration guide. Instead of just making it longer, we added original screenshots from 5 real migrations we’d performed, included our custom pre-migration checklist (a Google Sheet with 47 items), and recorded a video walkthrough. That guide earned 28 links in two months because it offered something the original couldn’t: proof of real experience.

Outreach to Existing Linkers

The outreach component is straightforward. Use Ahrefs to find everyone linking to the original piece you’ve improved upon. Send a short email explaining that you’ve created an updated, more complete resource and thought they might want to check it out. Don’t ask for a link directly. Let the quality of your content do the convincing.

My success rate with skyscraper outreach has dropped from about 11% in 2020 to roughly 6% in 2026. People get more outreach emails than ever, and many webmasters are numb to these requests. But 6% of links from sites that were already linking to similar content means you’re getting highly relevant, topically appropriate links. Quality over quantity.

Crowdfunding for Link Building

This one surprises people, but launching a product or project on Kickstarter or Indiegogo generates significant press coverage and backlinks. Even if the product isn’t your core business, a creative campaign can earn links from tech blogs, industry publications, and local media.

How This Works in Practice

I helped a WordPress development agency launch a free, open-source accessibility plugin on Kickstarter to fund its development. The campaign raised $12,000, but the real win was the 44 backlinks it earned from tech publications, accessibility advocacy sites, and WordPress community blogs. Those links had a combined estimated value of over $30,000 if we’d tried to acquire them through traditional outreach.

The campaign itself becomes a linkable event. Journalists cover interesting Kickstarter projects. Bloggers write about products they back. Community members share campaigns on forums and social media. You’re creating a story that people want to tell, and stories earn links naturally.

When to Use This Strategy

Crowdfunding link building isn’t for everyone. You need a product or project that’s genuinely interesting and fundable. A boring B2B SaaS tool probably won’t generate excitement on Kickstarter. But if you can frame your offering as something innovative or community-driven, this strategy can outperform months of traditional outreach in a single campaign.

I recommend this for clients who are launching something new and want maximum initial link velocity. The links come fast during and immediately after a campaign, which gives new products a strong SEO foundation from day one.

Measuring Link Building ROI

If you’re investing time and money in link building but not measuring results, you’re guessing. I track specific metrics for every client campaign, and I recommend you do the same.

The Metrics That Actually Matter

Forget vanity metrics like total number of links. Here’s what I track: referring domains (unique sites linking to you), domain authority of linking sites, relevance of linking sites to your niche, organic traffic growth correlated with link acquisition, and keyword ranking changes for target terms. I review these monthly for every client.

The metric I care about most is cost per quality link. A “quality link” in my definition is a dofollow link from a relevant site with DR 30+ that isn’t part of a link network. Across my client portfolio, the average cost per quality link in 2026 is about $180 when you factor in labor, tools, and outreach costs. Some strategies are cheaper (testimonial links cost almost nothing), while digital PR campaigns can push costs to $300+ per link.

Tracking Link Acquisition

I use Ahrefs for tracking new and lost backlinks. Set up alerts for your domain so you get notified whenever a new referring domain links to you. Cross-reference this with your outreach log to see which strategies are producing results. I keep a simple spreadsheet for each client: date, strategy used, outreach sent, links earned, DR of linking site, and estimated value.

The attribution to rankings is where it gets tricky. Links rarely cause overnight ranking jumps. More often, you’ll see gradual improvements over 3 to 6 months as your link profile strengthens. I tell clients to expect meaningful ranking movement 90 days after a sustained link building effort begins. If you’re not seeing movement after 6 months, something about your strategy needs to change.

What I’d Do With a Limited Budget

If you’re starting fresh and can only focus on 2 to 3 strategies, here’s exactly what I’d pick. First, testimonial link building because it’s free and has the highest success rate. Second, broken link building because it scales well with just time investment. Third, digital PR if you have any original data or expertise worth sharing with journalists.

Skip the paid link schemes. Skip the guest post farms charging $50 per placement on no-name blogs. Focus on earning links from real sites through genuine value. It takes longer, but the results actually stick. I’ve watched clients who built 200 links through shady vendors lose all of them when those link networks got deindexed. Meanwhile, clients who earned 40 real links through outreach and PR still have every single one of them years later.

The best link building strategy is the one you’ll execute consistently. Pick your 2 to 3 methods, commit to 5 to 10 hours per week, and run the playbook for at least 6 months before judging results. That’s how every successful campaign I’ve managed has worked.

Frequently Asked Questions

Pick one strategy from this list and execute it this week. Not next month. This week. Send 10 outreach emails, write 3 testimonials, or start researching broken links in your niche. The difference between people who build strong backlink profiles and those who don’t isn’t knowledge. It’s action. You now have the knowledge. Go put it to work.