Link building has changed a lot, and tactics that worked years ago can actively hurt you now. Here's a current read on what holds up.
Still works: genuinely useful content that earns links naturally (original data, tools, in-depth guides), guest posting on relevant/reputable sites, digital PR and journalist outreach, broken link building (finding dead links and offering your content as a replacement).
Penalized or risky: buying links in bulk from low-quality link farms, excessive reciprocal linking schemes, exact-match anchor text stuffing, and private blog networks (PBNs) that Google has gotten increasingly good at detecting.
The underlying shift: Google has gotten much better at identifying unnatural link patterns, so the "safe" strategy now looks a lot like just earning links the way a genuinely useful resource naturally would.
What's your current link building strategy, and has it changed recently?
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