{"id":3954,"date":"2026-09-28T12:10:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T12:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3way.social\/blog\/?p=3954"},"modified":"2026-09-28T12:10:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T12:10:18","slug":"link-building-tactics-that-survived-the-september-2026-spam-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3way.social\/blog\/link-building-tactics-that-survived-the-september-2026-spam-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Link building tactics that survived the September 2026 spam update"},"content":{"rendered":"

A spam update landed in the middle of last week and my inbox went very quiet. Google confirmed the September 2026 spam update on the 24th, rolling out globally across every language, and it can take up to two weeks to fully settle. Every time one of these drops, the same message turns up from clients: does link building still work? It does. The cheap link building tactics, scaled version has been on borrowed time for years though, and this update just tightens that.<\/p>\n

Google’s own note was typically vague. “Released the September 2026 spam update, which applies globally and to all languages. The rollout may take up to two weeks to complete.”<\/a> No target list. No hints. But spam updates have folded link spam into the same machinery since the December 2022 link spam update, so if a chunk of your profile came from dodgy sources, this is exactly the kind of thing that makes those links stop counting.<\/p>\n

What a spam update actually does to your links<\/h3>\n

You won’t get a manual action email. That’s the part people miss. The links just get discounted, rankings drift down over a fortnight, and you’re left refreshing Search Console<\/a> wondering what you did. I watched it happen to two clients last year who’d bought “20 DA50 links for \u00a3200” packages before they came to me. Great fun while it lasted…<\/p>\n

The reassuring bit: links are still scarce, so they’re still worth earning. Ahrefs crawled a billion pages and found 66.31% of them have zero referring domains<\/a>. Two thirds of the web has no links at all. So a handful of relevant, editorial links<\/a> still moves you ahead of most of your competition. The job now is earning them in a way that survives the next four spam updates too, not just this one.<\/p>\n

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The tactics I’d still put budget behind<\/h3>\n

Broken link building, done properly<\/h4>\n

People keep writing this one’s obituary and it keeps working. You find a dead page that lots of sites still link to, you point those sites at something better you’ve already got, and you make it easy for them to swap. Ahrefs’ broken backlink report or a quick Screaming Frog crawl of a resource page will surface these in minutes.<\/p>\n

The bit most people skip is relevance. A broken link on a page about kettlebell training should point to your kettlebell guide, not your homepage. Match the intent of the original link or don’t bother sending the email. Relevance is what turns this from spam into a favour.<\/p>\n

Reactive digital PR<\/h4>\n

Reactive PR is having a proper moment since HARO shut down at the end of 2024. Journalists still need sources. They’ve just scattered across Qwoted, Featured, SourceBottle and a hundred requests a day on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Give one actually useful quote backed by a real data point and you can earn a link from a masthead you could never buy your way onto.<\/p>\n

And those links pull weight. Backlinko’s study of a million search results found the #1 result has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 to 10<\/a>. It’s correlation rather than proof, sure. But I’ve never once seen a top-three result in a competitive niche running a thin link profile.<\/p>\n

Real link partnerships between real sites<\/h4>\n

Here’s where I’ll defend something people get squeamish about. Relevant, editorial links between two genuine businesses are fine. Google’s problem is with scale and manipulation, not with a wedding photographer linking to the florist they actually work with because it helps the reader. That’s just the web working as intended.<\/p>\n

Aleyda Solis has argued for years that link building is really “reference building”<\/a>: links, mentions, citations, the lot. I think that framing has aged really well. The sites winning now are the ones people reference without being asked, and a smart partnership is one way to earn that when you’re starting cold.<\/p>\n

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“Every spam update sends the same people into a panic and the same people to sleep soundly. If you’ve been earning links from relevant sites that would still link to you if Google vanished tomorrow, nothing changes for you. The businesses getting hit are the ones who treated links like a vending machine. That model’s been dying for a decade. This update just speeds up the funeral.” Ian Naylor, Founder 3Way Social<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What I’d stop doing this week<\/h3>\n