How To Get Free Backlinks in 2026 (Methods That Actually Work)

0:00This link building thread was going viral on the SEO subreddit last month. There is a lot of good stuff in it if you are looking to build backlinks without spending money, without paying for the links. The post is, "How are you guys building backlinks after Google officially said random and low-quality backlinks are useless. If I want real authentic links, I have to pay. I'm stuck with a backlink building." By user zealous ideal sky 632. "I'm an SEO analyst and one of the main

0:30responsibilities is backlink building. Recently after reading Google's official guidance that low-quality unrelated backlinks, like random blog submissions, directory submissions, bookmark sites, etc. don't provide value anymore, I completely stopped building those kinds of links. Now I'm stuck. Whenever I try to build genuine relevant backlinks, almost every website owner asks for payment. Very few are willing to link for free. So I'm confused. If I build random backlinks, it feels like a waste of time. If I focus on high-quality relevant backlinks, most opportunities are paid. How are you all handling this in 2026?" So this thread got so many comments, so many votes, I had to dig through so many awful AI comments, and

1:17actually a lot of my favorite comments were buried at the bottom because they were posted later. So I'm reading a bunch of comments, my favorite ones, some of them will be out of order in which they appeared cuz I went through everything for you and then I organized it by my favorites. The top one was from aromatic pineapple, who said, "For a LockTech client of mine whose target audience was hospitals, I took a research-first approach." And this is actually going to be a recurring theme in this thread, is what this person is sharing. So this person says, "I ran surveys, analyzed multiple research papers, interviewed hospital staff, and

1:54studied publicly available data. Based on all of that, I prepared a detailed article on how hospitals lose revenue. I shared it with a friend who works at a leading newspaper in South India. He liked it and published it in the technology column. After that, Medical Buyer Nirmitee and several other industry publications picked it up and republished it. We got free mentions and a high-quality backlinks from a leading

2:17newspaper without any outreach budget. This is what I would suggest. Create something unique and worth reading. Publish original research, reveal surprising statistics, present insights people haven't seen before. Then proactively reach out to relevant publications. Research with original data gets picked up naturally is what I observed. And it doesn't even have to be your data. This is from commenter valuable_win, who said, "First grab all the easy backlinks like local citations and

2:46social media profiles for your business. This is called foundational backlinks, by the way. Then next take some time to understand what your audience wants. Start developing content for those things. Try to reverse engineer it by asking what a website would link to in my industry or what you would link to in an article. Data stories are great. You

3:05don't even need to use your own data. Plenty of free data sources like Yelp Trends and government census data to help get you started. Here's an example. We recently pulled data from the census about pests, think mice, and correlated that with population to get a home infestation score. We then ranked it by state and sent the report to local papers. Got a dozen or so free links from that for our home insulation client. This next post, you could tell that the poster used AI as an assistant to write it, but I still think that this post has unique data. So, I decided to include it anyway. As in like I actually

3:44think it's somebody with a unique experience who just used AI to help them write it. So, this person bestpoint8381 said, "What I did instead of outreach, scrape an entire French sector, run a scripted audit on every site, publish the distribution. No survey, no interviews, nobody to email. 2,141 training providers, then 3,111 law firms, then 5,568 home services companies, then 5,706 tourism businesses. Roughly two days of work per sector once the scraper existed. Anyone writing about that sector needs a number to cite, and there isn't one, so they use mine. Same mechanism inside AI answers. A stat with

4:28a sample size and a date gets quoted. The requirements are lower than people assume. Public data, one metric people argue about. That's really smart. One metric that people argue about. Find something that people argue about because that shows that they care. And an honest methodology section that says what you did not measure. Mine excludes measured visibility entirely and says so, and that paragraph is a reason

4:52people trust the rest of the numbers. So, be transparent. Nobody has audited your niche at n equals 3,000. That gap is your link asset." Yeah, I like that post, too. This next one is from SEO Pub. SEO Pub, Mike Friedman, he's been on the podcast before. He's really great. He said, "Directories are not random." So, directories, I think of

5:12directories as foundational backlinks. If you're a real business, you probably are going to put yourself in a lot of relevant directories. You're going to try to find relevant directories. And I've seen this many, many times. So, with this new business that I'm funding, we used boostbenchmark.com. That's my affiliate link for a list of directories that I really like. We used that, put ourselves in all the directories on that list, and then our rankings improved immediately. They improved immediately because these are relevant, indexed, not small, random BS. It's the type of places that an actual business would put themselves. So, directories are not random. Then, SEO Pub says, "If you want

5:50to consistently build links, you are probably going to have to pay for them, no big deal, or creating linkable assets are another good method. With AI these days, it is so easy to build quizzes, tools, or other interactive elements on a site." Actually, I have a great episode on this, episode 1037 of this podcast, how one simple website got 384,000

6:13backlinks, linkable assets explained. And basically, I share all these examples of viral linkable assets that were so successful, no link building budget could recreate that. And then, I share a formula that you can use to ideate your own linkable assets. So, I highly recommend that episode. This comment is from Old Occasion 9380, who said, "Start close to home. Do your firm's partners, vendors, and customers already link to them to highlight the relationship? Are there awards or badging programs you could initiate that would encourage linking? Could be as simple as naming the best uses {slash} applications of your product and showcasing them, giving the winners HTML badges to showcase their award? Does

6:58your client have some information that's relevant in their local community where they could offer Q&A content to a newspaper, like Ask the Gardener with a site? These, along with the quote and content ideas above, work well for both SEO and AI citations." I want to add goodwill link building, doing good things for people and then asking for the link for the companies and

7:20organizations you do good things for. And giving anonymous tips to newspapers about the good thing that you did, because newspapers love sharing feel-good stories. I have an entire episode on that from a couple days ago, episode 1155 of the podcast, he donated a free roof and got links you can't buy. That is That will give you tons of ideas. I have ideas in that for e-commerce, SaaS, and local services, and you will love that episode. This next comment by Mobile Reveal 8938 is on why a lot of people over prioritize backlinks, which they do. You

7:57don't need a million backlinks to rank. This is what you need. So, this person says, "I've seen very few comments that mention paid backlinks aren't organic backlinks, and Google/Bing will ignore them at the least de-list sites at the most extreme. It's pretty simple. If you pay for it, it isn't organic. And eventually, the search engines will figure it out, and you are out the money spent. I'd suggest stop trying to game the system. Like a casino, it isn't your system, and it's not even your game. And on top of that, the house always wins in

8:29the end." First of all, that is amazing. I really agree with that. Backlinks are important and might have up to 1/3 the weight among ranking signals, but an equal weight goes to the metrics content quality/relevance/uniqueness. Another large percentage is the on-page experience. You might get away with buying backlinks, but if the other ranking factors are so-so, you are probably twisting yourself into a pretzel finding target search queries that show improved ranking. Or, you are using target queries that rely more on local SEO and your Google Business Listing than content-based SEO. I've been in SEO for over 20 years going back to when link farms and article spinning

9:10was a real thing. I've seen my white hat turn black after Google updates and had to repair the errors the newly blacklisted tactics created. Today, our SEO work is based on content and page audits, competitor content analysis, and analytics trends. We win organic search more often and get paid more per page. We leverage the other 2/3 of ranking signals. So, the other 2/3 are relevance, as in have a target keyword, put it in your page title, URL slug, H1, beginning of your first sentence, meta description is optional, and behavioral signals. Have page titles people want to click. Give the answer right away so they don't immediately pogo stick and go

9:49back to the search results to look for something better. I ran a poll on X recently. I said, "Out of this list, what's the most important Google ranking factor? User signals, relevance, or authority?" The winner of this 157 votes was authority, but my opinion is it's user signals, then relevance, then authority. And I've been saying this for a long time. People really over index on the importance of authority. Authority is important, but if you have a site with a lot of authority and terrible user signals, it's not going to matter and you're going to get de-indexed. Or a page with high relevance can very easily beat a page with high authority and very

10:26little relevance. So, I agree with what Mobile Reveal 8938 said in the comment. This is from Redditor 7 26378 who said, "I rank numbers 1 through 5 for 200 plus keywords and never bought a backlink or made an effort with the exception of digital PR/press posts." Just a simple comment on how a lot of people over index on the importance of backlinks. Backlinks are important, especially if you're a new site or if you're going after the most competitive terms, but a lot of people don't need to do that. You don't need to go after the most competitive terms. Most people actually overlook the most competitive keywords and don't even know how to

11:07optimize for keywords properly in the way that I described a couple minutes ago. Expert quotes, got to mention it. This is from commenter November Sky 18 who said, "I'd recommend some sort of digital PR. You actually don't need to pay for it if you sign up for services like HARO or Quoted. Just be really quick in responding and please don't use AI generated answers when pitching journalists unless you want to get banned. You can also use sources sources and connectively, which was previously called featured. And the last comment I'll share is from Gavelist, who said and said this about these low-quality paid backlinks. Not useless. They will

11:46actively tank your geo. I audited a company that was doing crappy backlinks from their previous SEO firm. They had a beautiful geo build, whatever that means, but they had a set of about 20 paid for backlinks that AI rightfully flagged as misleading, paid for or fake. Their AI visibility should have been over 50% of queries. They were showing up at less than 6%. You'd have to ask their name in the question to AI to have them show up. It's probably more advantageous to the client to actively remove their backlinks if they are crap quality. So, I took this to mean that doing test due diligence on this company

12:25with AI, the AI was calling out these suspicious mentions in the form of these paid backlinks. Could also be that this person was just using AI to help do the SEO audit. When I read this the first time, I took it to mean the AI was saying this company is suspicious because of these low-quality looking, spammy-looking backlinks, which you absolutely see. I have seen in the thinking stage Claude saying filtering out SEO spam. So, it's absolutely possible. Anyway, you don't need to pay for backlinks. You want the foundational links, and then there are a million billion cool creative fun ways to get top websites or relevant websites, real

13:07websites, real businesses to link to you. And then, optimize for relevance, optimize for behavioral signals, and look for high-intent keywords that competitors aren't targeting. If you want to save years learning how to identify these keywords, and then how to find them, the high-intent keywords that competitors aren't targeting, I have an SEO course on this, Compact Keywords. It shows you how to find searches with real buying intent, where the person on the end of the search is looking to buy something, use something, or make a discovery call. And I show you how to find these searches, target them with conversion-based SEO landing pages, structure your site for these pages, do

13:45an SEO technical audit, more strategies for building links, examples in every niche, and so much more. There's so much in this course. If you haven't checked it out yet, check it out. Please, you will really like it. You can get it at compactkeywords.com, and that's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This episode 1,160 of the podcast, 1,160 days in a row doing this show. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again

14:16tomorrow. Bye now.