Backlink network building strategies: an SEO link building guide for 2026

There are many definitions of a backlink network, and almost everyone who has tried to systematise the concept would offer their own.

Still, I can assume that it means placing a link to a specific website somewhere that allows a direct or indirect visit to that website. A backlink network is built for search engine spiders, crawlers and bots, as well as for the users themselves.

Building a link network, alongside optimising the code of the target site (SEO), is part of the process of positioning a website in search results.

The guiding principle of the whole concept is simple: place a link to the target site, spark interest, bring the visitor to the target site and keep them there as long as possible in order to monetise that traffic directly or indirectly (the user may come back later through the page indexed in the SERP).

#1. How direct visits from links work

The user reaches the target site by coming across a link to it (while online) on another website, in software, an ad, a presentation, a widget, a game or another electronic product.

#2. How an indirect visit to a website works

#2.1 Visits by typing a remembered or saved address

The user reaches the website by recalling its address from memory, from a note or from an image, and typing that address into the browser at a later time.

#2.2 URL shorteners and 301/302 redirects

The most common defence against abuse is to redirect the user from address A to target address B. Many tools and scripts have been created for this purpose, with functions such as:

• shortening the URL (so that, for example, a user can fit more text into a post on a microblogging service; this also covers visits from the SERP, web directories, presell pages and so on)
• parameterising: the link leads to a script that reads, for example, the user’s hardware settings, and then sends them to the right page with the appropriate parameters
• spam resistance: these aim to stop link juice from passing to the target site, which is meant to discourage users from abuse

• URL correction: redirects applied directly on the site the user landed on, using server commands or web programming languages (among them port forwarding, meta, JavaScript, htaccess, 301/302 redirects)

You can obtain links from sites that are very often not subject to editorial control. These include forums, blogs, blog comments, guestbooks, social networks, instant messengers (and their status descriptions), wiki sites, discussion groups and job boards. Such places are usually not reviewed before publication and are an excellent way to extend link network building. However, indexers practically never visit these pages, either because of the abuse common in such places or for technical reasons (instant messengers, for example). Site owners defend themselves against abuse by adding the rel=“nofollow” attribute to external links posted on the site, or by leaving links as plain text. Adding links to such sites can be mechanised by building scripts or bots that detect forums running on the same engines and then fill in the form fields automatically. Another common strategy is to create valuable texts enriched with videos, graphics, photos, sounds, software and presentations that are clearly marked as yours. Material that cannot be obtained from companies or third parties is often reused by competitors, who under press law should cite the source when quoting it. The publisher thus gains a reference to its source page, although these are most often text mentions that only signal contact with the brand. Educational activity of any kind, such as taking an active part in presentations, training sessions, talks and interviews, strongly shapes the image of an expert in a given field, and that in turn significantly shapes how the brand and the website the expert represents are perceived. Contributing to other blogs and forums, commenting for the media and being quoted often as an expert all build a positive image of the target site’s representative and are an important factor in building a link network.

Building a link network, alongside optimising the code of the target site (SEO), is part of the process of positioning a website. Most website owners aim to promote their target site as widely as possible in order to attract as many users as possible. When users visit a site, it means they are looking for information related to it or want to make a purchase. The role of a website (unless it is loss-making by design) is to return the investment made in creating it, with as large a margin as possible.

Links to the target site scattered across different media are the engine of its ranking in the SERP, but that alone does not make any of the strategies described here a success. You also need to remember the optimisation of the site’s own code, how pages are built, their structure, design, valuable and unique content, and the other factors that affect positions in search results. You can, of course, try one of the strategies without optimising the code itself, but in that case most of the traffic to the target site will eventually come from media other than search engines. Think of it like selling a car. An honest owner makes sure all parts of the vehicle work. Any documented changes the owner has made, such as replacing mechanical parts that wear out naturally, in theory raise the value of the car. Replacing the parts without which the car could not perform its basic functions does not change the price radically, but potential buyers will pay the same price for a working car as they would for one that does not run. Link building strategy works the same way: you cannot attract and keep users on the target site if it does not work properly or if users cannot find what they came for, even if some of the strategies above have been applied to it.

There are as many ways to define, create and adopt a link network building strategy within the positioning process as there are people managing link building or SEO projects. This piece lists only the most popular areas, the places where such projects were most often carried out. Choosing the right link building strategies also cannot be generalised for every site a network is built for. You can point to common strategies for social and blogging sites, but using the same texts and similar-looking code snippets on those sites may get pages thrown out of the SERP, which is the last result you want from a link network strategy for a target site.

Link building strategy should be treated as a part of the business that gets as much time as possible. Just as you check the tools that monitor your server and visitor numbers every day, building the network continuously and actively should be a ritual. Do not treat this task as a campaign that you prepare, launch, release and then suddenly pause, stop or stop monitoring. That approach makes it easier for competitors to gain an advantage. A lack of determination can not only halt the growth of the target site but also cause a sharp drop in visits. On the other hand, overzealousness has a similar effect: adding a large number of uniform links to the target site, especially from sites with completely unrelated content or from spam sites, can cause the same damage. Applying knowledge backed by experience, or handing the project to a certified and reputable company, may (but does not have to) bring benefits to the target site over the long term.

The future of link network building depends above all on technological and technical factors, and on changes to search engine algorithms, which will probably react even faster to changes on the web and become smarter, for example by using semantic networks. The exact directions are not known, but the trend stays the same: search results will be as valuable as possible and as closely matched to the query as possible.

#What Google’s spam policies count as link spam

Most of the tactics described above were written down in 2009. Google’s current rules for them sit in the spam policies for Google web search on Google Search Central. The policy defines link spam as creating links to or from a site mainly to manipulate search rankings, and it lists concrete examples. Several of them map directly onto the strategies in this article:

• forum comments with optimised links in the post or in the signature, which covers the forum, guestbook and blog comment placements described earlier;
• automated programs or services that create links to your site, which is exactly the bot that finds forums running the same engine and fills in their forms;
• keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets distributed across many sites;
• low-quality directory or bookmark site links;
• links widely distributed in the footers or templates of many sites;
• excessive link exchanges and partner pages that exist only for cross-linking;
• buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, including exchanging goods or services for links and sending someone a product so they write about it with a link;
• links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites;
• creating low-value content mainly to manipulate linking and ranking signals.

The same page separates paid links from link spam. Google states that buying and selling links is a normal part of the web economy and is not a policy violation as long as the links are qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". The forum and comment placements also fall under a separate heading in the same policy, user-generated spam, which names spammy forum posts and comment spam on blogs among its examples.

#How nofollow, ugc and sponsored link attributes work

The article mentions the rel="nofollow" attribute as the way site owners defend themselves against comment spam. That attribute changed meaning in 2019. In a post on the Google Search Central blog dated 10 September 2019, Google recalled that nofollow had been introduced in 2005 to fight comment spam and announced two more values:

• rel="sponsored" for links created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements;
• rel="ugc" for links inside user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts;
• rel="nofollow" remains for cases where you link to a page without implying any endorsement.

Before that change Google did not count nofollow links as a signal in its algorithms at all. Since then all three values are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude. Google gave its reason in the same post: links carry useful information, for example the words used to describe the target, and looking at all of them helps it spot unnatural linking patterns. Existing nofollow links do not need to be changed, and values can be combined, for example rel="nofollow ugc".

The current documentation page, qualify your outbound links to Google, adds that links with these attributes will generally not be followed, but the target pages may still be found by other means, such as sitemaps or links from other sites. For a link network this means a nofollow comment link is neither guaranteed to be worthless nor guaranteed to count. Its weight is Google’s decision.

#How Google treats 301 and 302 redirects

Section 2.2 lists redirects among the tools of indirect traffic. Google’s documentation on redirects and Google Search splits them into two groups:

• permanent: HTTP 301 and 308, a meta refresh with a 0 second delay, a JavaScript location change and a so-called crypto redirect; Google follows them and treats the target as the canonical URL, so the new address appears in search results;
• temporary: HTTP 302, 303 and 307 and a meta refresh with a delay longer than 0 seconds; Googlebot follows them too, but the indexing pipeline does not take them as a signal that the target should be canonical, so the source page is the one shown in results.

Google advises using JavaScript redirects only when server-side or meta refresh redirects are not possible, because rendering can fail and the redirect may never be seen. Crypto redirects, a page that only tells the visitor the content has moved and links to it, are a last resort. A URL shortener answers with an HTTP redirect, so the same rules decide which address Google keeps.

#What the December 2022 link spam update changed

On 14 December 2022 Google announced on the Search Central blog that its AI-based spam prevention system, SpamBrain, can detect both sites that buy links and sites used for passing outgoing links. The second group describes a network of supporting sites built only to link out. The update took about two weeks to roll out and affected all languages. Google wrote that rankings may change as spammy links are neutralised and that any credit passed by these unnatural links is lost, and that its algorithms and manual actions aim to nullify such links at scale. A network built only to pass links does not have to be penalised to stop working: its links can simply stop counting.

#What Google means by a crawlable link and good anchor text

A link only helps if Google can follow it. The link best practices page says Google can generally crawl a link only when it is an <a> element with an href attribute holding a real web address. Forms such as a span with an href or links driven only by onclick are not recommended, and javascript: URLs are discouraged. For image links, the alt text serves as anchor text.

On anchor text the guidance is to keep it descriptive, concise and relevant to both pages, to avoid generic phrases like “click here”, and not to cram keywords into it, which can count as keyword stuffing. On outbound links Google recommends nofollow only when you do not trust the source, sponsored or nofollow for paid links, and ugc or nofollow for user-submitted links in forums or Q&A sections.

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