How do get good backlinks in 2026? The truth that SemRush won't tell you

I searched up how to get good backlinks on Google and came across this article by Semrush - How to get backlinks in 2026.

It ranks very highly for the term "how to get backlinks" and I must say a lot of it sounds like good advice, but none of it is actually practical.

For example, here's their excerpt on how to ask for a link.

Now why in the world is some authority website just gonna give you a nice link just because you asked for it? That makes zero sense whatsoever. They don't want to be linking out to random websites because it actively hurts their own website.

I get emails like this all the time and I always mark it as spam.

You're gonna get your email account permanently in the spam folder long before you can get any good backlinks.

The golden rule of business is there is no free lunch.

It's simple. You pay or trade for it. Indirectly or directly.

Oh my god! Isn't that ILLEGAL?!?

Hell no. It's called advertising. And people have been doing it for years.

Every authoritative SEO blog makes it seem like buying backlinks is somehow the devil's work, when in reality pretty much every large company is doing it.

And while I'm sure some penalties are happening somewhere in the multi-verse, the reality is Google is not able to penalize you that hard unless you're doing something super shady - like stuffing footer links on casino websites.

Worst case scenario, they just don't give you any boost for the links they deem to be fishy in most cases.

Of course, if you go with some shady PBN Blackhat link building agency that stuffs your link in a bunch of porn websites, then you'll probably get banned from Google (even though I have yet to personally see it).

Backlinks is really simple 2-step formula.

1. Find relevant brands in your niche that aren't direct competitors.

2. Offer to do some kind of trade or sponsorship for a link.

I've done the real work

I'm always curious if the people at SemRush have actually done any of the stuff they preach. Or maybe everything works well for them since they're a big company. It's like the hot girl at school, where everything just seems to work out for them.

But for the guys who are actually in the weeds of this stuff every day, we know how hard it is to get real legitimate backlinks.

I've been doing SEO since 2003 for both my own brands and for others. Ever since my first kpop website went live, I've been figuring out how to work the search engines for more traffic. I ran programmatic SEO before anyone did when I was 16 years old. Back then it was as simple as hiring some cheap writers (or doing it myself) to regurgitate bios on Kpop stars, add photos, and add it to my database under SEO-optimized urls. Now, of course, the landscape has changed dramatically since then.

Right now it's that kind of moment for AEO (or is it called GEO?) since AI models are still in their infancy. Right now is the best time to get free traffic.

But before we continue, here's something interesting that a lot of people might disagree with.

Don't worry about no-follow vs follow links.

Yes, you want follow links, but no-follow links from a legit source are just as good.

Google still sees them all, even if you're being no-followed. What matters is that the links are high quality, relevant, and coming from a "legit" source. Not some website that was made 2 months ago. A podcast that's been running for 10 years that gives you a no-follow link is still amazingly relevant.

For example, we did a YouTube podcast tour for one of the brands I worked with. It was all no-follow links in YouTube descriptions.

This boosted organic by a ton in Google. It happens that YouTube is one of the most cited sources out there.

Of course, we had to get on legitimate video podcasts for this to work, but even then, this effort truly magnified the brand's SEO,

Find relevant brands in your niche that aren't direct competitors.

If you're using Hyax, we have this directly in the link builder feature under SEO app.

You'll set up a brief prompt about what your website / app is about, then list your competitors.

The app then finds all the publications that have written about your competitors and are relevant to your niche.

This is your money list.

Once you've found a list of 10, it's time to do some cold outreach. (Eventually you'll do 10 a day).

A decent sample email might be

If you want to be even more explicit and get right to the point, ask for their editorial fees if any and mention that your company is ready to pay.

Find top 10 list or alternative lists

This is the best type of link to grab.

If you're an email marketing software, for example. The best places to get listed are on the lists of

1. Top 10 best email marketing software of 2026

2. Top 10 alternatives to Mailchimp

Even if you're ranked #10 - you're actually in a good spot here.

Here's an email I've drafted many times that will get you listed.

Link exchanges

Aren't link exchanges bad?

No not inherently.

You have to understand that Google's goal is to get the highest quality content out there. It's super obvious to Google that you're just linking to a piece of content just because you did a link exchange.

But for example, let's say I'm making an article about the best email marketing apps, and I link to the email marketing app, then that app writes an article about "Which CMS to use in 2026" and they link to Hyax, that's the type of link that Google likes.

So if you want to exchange links, just do it with actually good websites, with real articles.

When you exchange links with crappy sites, then you'll get crappy results.

Best Practices to Stay Safe

If you participate in this style of link exchange, seasoned SEO professionals follow strict guardrails to minimize risk:

1. Maintain Relevance: Only trade links with websites in the same or closely related niche. The links must add value for the reader.

2. Use Natural Content: Do not dump links in sidebars, footers, or uncontextualized blog posts. Always embed the links within high-quality, long-form editorial articles.

3. Control the Ratio: Keep reciprocal and exchanged links to a very low percentage (e.g., less than 10-15%) of your total overall backlink profile. Your profile should be dominated by one-way editorial links.

Guest posting

Guest posting is one of the best ways to get links, but it's definitely changed.

The biggest problem is guest posting used to be a team of overseas workers who just created thin, shitty content on your behalf, and then spammed a bunch of editorials to get links. That worked somewhat.

But now that its so easy to spin up that kind of content with AI, the quality matters a lot more.

Now, you need actual expertise (EEAT signals), voice, and know-how (crazy concept, I know).

So it's actually much more moving if you guest blog post and you're a:

• Legit CEO or industry leader

• Have a popular YouTube channel or social media

• Written other good blog posts

• Written other thought pieces in the space

If you have all that, and you're not just a Reddit spam bot, then guest posting is a pretty great strategy.

Press Releases

Press is also another great source of backlinks back to your company.

Let's say you're in the food business. Every time you release a new restaurant, food item, etc, you might have bloggers that continually post updates about what you're doing.

Maybe you're a startup that just received VC funding. That's a huge source of press. Reporters at TechCrunch, Business Insider, and every niche trade blog in your space are actively hunting for funding announcements because it's easy content for them to write.

Back in the day, it was pretty easy to get press mentions. Now, it's definitely a lot harder since the world of startups has expanded and every founder with an X account thinks they deserve coverage.

A few things that actually still work:

• Send the announcement directly to a reporter who's covered your niche before, not a generic tips@ inbox. Personalize the first line so it's obvious you read their last three articles.

• Give them something with a number in it. We raised $2m to do X, happy to do an interview or comment.

• Use a service like HARO or Qwoted. (Tbh, I've never used these, but everyone says they work. So your mileage may vary).

• Don't pay $500 for a PRNewswire blast expecting backlinks. Most of those syndication sites are known to be pretty shitty, and Google barely counts them anymore.

The real trick with press is timing it around something newsworthy: a product launch, a weird milestone, a controversial opinion about your industry. Boring press releases get ignored no matter how many wire services you pay.

Podcast or Youtube show tours

The more podcasts you can get on, the better it is for your EEAT signals and the more links you're going to get.

Here's the part you need to know: most podcast hosts will link to your website and social profiles in the show notes automatically, without you even asking. That's a free, relevant, contextual backlink for basically showing up and talking for 40 minutes.

Say interesting things, you'll automatically get cited. Hosts quote guests in their newsletter, in a LinkedIn recap post, sometimes in a follow-up blog post that breaks down the episode. Every one of those is another link.

How to actually get booked without an agent or a publicist:

1. Search for podcasts your ideal customer already listens to, not just "marketing podcasts." Niche shows with 200 downloads an episode still count, and hosts of small shows respond way faster than the big ones.

2. Pitch a specific story or opinion, not "I'd love to be on your show." Something like "I can talk about why most agencies get backlinks backwards" gets a reply. "I'm an SEO expert, happy to chat" doesn't.

3. Do the boring follow-up. Send the host the episode link once it's live, thank them, and ask if they want a quote or graphic for their promo post. That's usually when the extra links show up.

4. The best podcasts have a website. You want to get on that website as well as on YouTube. We encourage every podcast to create their own website.

Even if you're just on YouTube, that's still a real backlink, and the video description alone is worth going after.

Do integration marketing

This is a really good one if you're a SaaS company. Do some kind of joint venture with a company adjacent to your niche.

For example, Hyax might do an integration with Zapier. Email them to cross promote. Keep in mind, look for companies that are around your size, where you can talk to the founder. Not some random company that's way out of your league.

A few more examples of what this actually looks like:

• A scheduling app integrates with a video conferencing tool, and both sides write a "how to run meetings with X and Y" post linking to each other.

• A payroll platform builds a connector for a time-tracking app, then the two co-host a webinar and cross-link the landing pages in the follow-up email.

• A Shopify app partners with a shipping tool, and both get a spot in the other's "integrations" directory page, which usually hands you a do-follow link that stays live as long as the partnership does.

• A newsletter tool integrates with a CRM, then the CRM's help docs link out to the newsletter tool's setup guide (and vice versa), which is a link Google treats as genuinely useful since it's solving a real problem for a real user.

None of these require a press hit or a cold pitch to a stranger. You're already building the integration anyway, so you might as well ask for the link while you're at it.

Always be networking

All of these tactics are made easier and more possible the bigger your network is. Once you have some kind of reputation, people want to help you more.

If you're just some overseas spammer sending mass link exchange requests, no one wants to help you. Even if you get some nice links here and there, the end result is that you're not going to be getting a lot of great high authority links.

Going to conferences, letting people know you're a writer, and even having a podcast or YouTube channel are huge in today's day and age.

What kind of content naturally gets links?

Whitepapers work because they give other people something to point to instead of something to promote. Nobody wants to link to your homepage. Everyone wants to link to the one document that has the number they need for their own article.

Here's a good example from Fal - State of Generative Media report.

Say you run a payments company. Instead of writing "5 Tips to Reduce Chargebacks," you pull anonymized data from your own transaction volume and publish "Chargeback Rates by Industry: Q3 2026." Now every fintech blogger, every Reddit thread about disputes, every journalist covering holiday fraud season has a reason to cite you, because you're the source of the number, not another opinion about the number.

A few formats that consistently earn links, in order of how often I've seen them work:

• Benchmark reports. Aggregate data you already have sitting in your product (average email open rates, average time-to-close, average churn by plan tier) and turn it into an annual or quarterly report. Journalists and other bloggers cite these constantly because the alternative is running their own survey, which costs money and time they don't have.

• State-of-the-industry surveys. Email your existing customer list or user base 10-15 questions, get a few hundred responses, and publish the results with actual charts. Even a small sample size beats no data at all, and "we surveyed 340 marketers" is a specific, citable line that generic advice content can't match.

• Methodology breakdowns. If you built something clever internally (how you calculate a score, how you detect fraud, how you price a product), write up the actual method with the tradeoffs you considered. Technical publications and adjacent SaaS blogs love linking to a real methodology instead of hand-waving around it.

• Failure or postmortem reports. "We tried X for a year and it didn't work, here's what we learned instead" gets shared and cited far more than another success story, because it's rarer and more useful.

The distribution part matters as much as the writing. Once the whitepaper exists, don't just post it and wait. Pitch it directly to the same reporters and bloggers you'd target for press coverage, since a whitepaper with real numbers is exactly the kind of thing they're hunting for when they need to cite a stat mid-article. Drop it in relevant subreddits and forums where people are already asking the question your data answers. And repurpose the same data into three or four smaller posts, each one a different angle on the same dataset, so you're not relying on a single asset to carry the whole campaign.

One thing to watch: refresh the data at least once a year. A 2023 benchmark report is dead weight by 2026; nobody links to stale numbers, and Google can tell the difference between a living resource and an abandoned one.

Save time by automating your outreach

Inside Hyax, we have automations and an outreach app that will let you automatically outreach to relevant bloggers and publications.

Use the backlinking tool to first find prospects, then import them into the outbound tool with the create campaign button. Make sure you've set up an outbound marketing inbox for this to work.

In conclusion, the Backlink Playbook, Boiled Down

Semrush isn't wrong that backlinks matter. It's wrong about how you get them. Nobody hands over a link from a cold email that says "please add me." You pay for it, trade for it, or earn it by being interesting enough that someone wants to mention you. Pick your lane and stop pretending there's a shortcut.

The tactics that actually move the needle are boring and repeatable: build a money list of sites that already link to your competitors, pitch top-10 and alternative lists where even the #10 spot sends real traffic, trade links only with sites that would make sense to a human reader, and guest post only if you've got something worth saying. Press works when it's tied to a real number or a real launch, not a generic wire blast. Podcast tours quietly stack up contextual, relevant links just by showing up and saying something worth quoting.

None of this happens overnight. Ten cold emails a day for a few months beats one panicked link-buying spree before a Google update. And the highest-leverage move on this whole list still isn't outreach at all, it's making something good enough that other sites want to point at it without being asked.