Backlink & SEO News
Real news and sharp analysis from the world of backlinks and search — Google updates, link-spam policy, and what actually works right now.
Is HARO Dead? Expert-Quote Links After Connectively
HARO died as Connectively in December 2024 and came back free under Featured in April 2025. What expert-quote links are worth now, and how to still win them.
Linkable Assets: Content That Earns Links on Autopilot
94% of blog posts earn zero external links. Linkable assets are the few that do: the types that work, what makes them cited, and how to build one a quarter.
Read
Digital PR for Backlinks: The #1 Link Method in 2026
48.6% of SEOs call digital PR the most effective link method in 2026, and a campaign averages 42 referring domains. Why it won, and how a small team runs it.
Read
How AI Agents Are Starting to Buy Backlinks
Link buying is becoming something an AI agent does on your behalf: it finds relevant, real-traffic sites, drafts the brief, places the order and reports back — while a human keeps the only key that moves money. What actually changes, where agents go wrong, and the procurement contract to give one.
Read
Will AI-Written Content Get Your Backlinks Penalized?
You bought a backlink and the placement article was AI-written — is that a penalty risk? The honest answer is no, not for being AI. Google penalizes low-quality, scaled content abuse regardless of how it's produced, and says appropriate AI use is fine. The real risk for a link buyer isn't the tool — it's thin, unedited, irrelevant content on junk sites. Here's what actually triggers a problem, what the ranking data shows, and how to use AI content safely for links.
Read
llms.txt & Agentic Search: Making Your Site Readable to AI Agents
Everyone's rushing to add llms.txt — and most are adding it for the wrong reason. The honest 2026 data: it does not move your AI citations (a 300,000-domain study found no lift, and search crawlers barely fetch it). Its real value is agentic readiness — the coding agents, MCP servers and shopping agents that already use it — as the agentic web arrives. Here's what llms.txt is, what the data actually shows, and the bigger job of making your whole site readable to AI agents.
Read
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): How to Get Cited by ChatGPT & Perplexity
GEO is optimizing to be cited by AI answers, not to rank — and the two barely overlap: fewer than 10% of the sources AI engines quote rank in Google's top 10 for the same query. This is the on-page playbook that actually earns citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Gemini in 2026: structure every passage to stand alone, lead with a 40–60 word answer, add statistics and sources, keep it fresh, and back it with the off-site credibility AI trusts.
Read
Brand Mentions vs Backlinks: The New Authority Signal
"Brand mentions are the new backlinks" is half true. The honest 2026 answer: an unlinked mention is a weak, indirect signal for classic Google search — but a strong, direct input to AI visibility, correlating with AI citations about three times more than backlinks do. Here's what a mention actually does, the "implied links" myth worth dropping, why being named still matters even when it's indirect, and how to earn (and reclaim) mentions the smart way.
Read
Do Backlinks Still Matter for AI Overviews & ChatGPT?
With AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity answering the questions people used to Google, it's fair to ask whether backlinks still count. The 2026 data says yes — but their job changed. Backlinks are now a threshold, not a lever: they get your page into the trusted pool an AI draws from, but beyond a baseline it's brand mentions and citation-ready structure that decide whether you actually get quoted. Here's what the correlation studies really show, and how to build links for the AI-search era.
Read
How AI Is Changing Link Building (and What Still Needs a Human)
AI didn't kill link building — it moved the work. The grunt (finding sites, vetting metrics, writing the article, even placing the order) now collapses to minutes, while the parts that decide whether a link actually works — real editorial relevance, is-the-traffic-real, trust, and strategy — still need a human in the loop. Here's exactly what AI now does well, what it still can't be trusted to judge, and the model that wins: machine speed with human control.
Read
Local SEO Backlinks & the Map Pack: What Actually Moves You Up
Local link building runs on different rules than organic. Links are only about 15% of what ranks you in the Map Pack — Google Business Profile, reviews and on-page do most of the work — so you need far fewer of them, and geographic relevance beats volume every time. Three links from a local paper or chamber can outweigh fifty generic directories. Here's where local backlinks actually fit, the sources worth chasing, and how citations differ from links.
Read
The SaaS Link Building Playbook for 2026
SaaS link building is a different game — you own assets most sites never will (a product, proprietary data, an integration ecosystem), and your highest-value links point at pages that convert, not at the blog. This playbook covers where to actually point links, the product-led assets that earn them on autopilot, why integrations are the most relevant links you'll ever get, and the steady, relevance-first backbone that seeds authority while the rest compounds.
Read