Link building in 2026 (without buying)
Editorial links, digital PR, broken-link reclamation, and the link patterns Google penalises in 2026.
DR is a vanity metric — topical relevance wins
A DR40 link from a topically aligned publication outperforms a DR70 link from an unrelated blog. Build a link map by topic cluster, not by DR. Use Common Crawl + GSC to find which referring domains drive actual traffic vs just sit in your backlink profile.
Three patterns that still work in 2026
Statistic-led content (others cite the data), tool-led content (others link to the tool), and original-research reports (others reference the methodology). All three put you on the citation side of the link graph.
Patterns to avoid
Guest-post networks, PBNs, low-quality SAPE-style buys, niche-edit services. Google's spam algorithms identify these reliably; the question is when not whether the manual or algorithmic penalty lands.
Common questions
Is HARO still worth it?
Connectively (HARO's successor) plus Featured.com plus Qwoted give you 80% of journalist intent. Worth the time for any thought-leader-led brand.