The Backlinks Game Has Changed

6 min read

We’ve written before about the fundamentals of backlinks — what they are, the different types, and why Domain Authority matters. That article still holds up as a primer. But the environment those fundamentals operate in has shifted meaningfully over the past year or so, and a backlink strategy built purely on the old playbook is going to underperform, or worse, attract the kind of attention from Google you don’t want.

Google ran a core update in March 2025, a spam update targeting unnatural link building in June 2025, and another spam update in August 2025 that fully activated SpamBrain’s ability to identify and isolate low-quality “parasite” sections of a website from the authority of the parent domain. A December 2025 core update doubled down again on quality, trust and expertise. By March 2026, Google was running a core update explicitly targeting synthetic, low-value content — with reports of roughly a quarter of previously top-10 ranking pages dropping out for simply summarising existing results without adding anything new. That’s not a minor tweak. That’s a fundamentally different environment to build a link strategy in than the one that existed two or three years ago.

What SpamBrain Actually Changed

SpamBrain, Google’s machine-learning spam detection system, has become considerably more capable at identifying “parasite SEO” — where a low-authority or unrelated business buys space on a high-authority website (a subdomain, a sponsored content section) purely to borrow that domain’s ranking power. Previously, these sections could ride on the parent site’s overall authority. The August 2025 update effectively taught SpamBrain to evaluate these sections in isolation, stripping out the borrowed authority they used to benefit from. Any link strategy that depended on this kind of arrangement lost most of its value overnight.

Quality Over Quantity Isn't a Cliché Anymore — It's the Whole Game

It’s now genuinely possible to build 100 backlinks and see no measurable impact on rankings, while a competitor earns 25 highly relevant links on genuinely authoritative, on-topic publications and sees a significant jump. The old mental model — more links roughly equals more authority — was already a simplification. It’s now closer to actively wrong as a strategy, because a large volume of low-relevance links is exactly the pattern Google’s current spam detection is tuned to spot and discount.

The Tactics That Have Stopped Earning Their Keep

Paid directory submissions and low-quality “resource page” links with no editorial relevance
Bulk guest posting on network sites that exist purely to sell backlink placements
Exact-match anchor text link building at scale, which reads as manipulative rather than natural
Parasite SEO arrangements that borrow authority from a high-DA domain without genuine editorial relevance
Private blog networks (PBNs) — always risky, now more detectable than ever

None of these tactics necessarily gets a site penalised overnight. More often, they simply stop working — the links get devalued or ignored rather than actively punished, which is arguably worse, because it’s easy to keep spending budget on a tactic and not notice it’s stopped moving the needle.

What's Actually Replacing Them

The links earning real value now tend to come from genuine coverage: original research and data that a journalist or industry publication chooses to reference, commentary from a credible spokesperson quoted in a relevant story, and brand mentions that accumulate into recognised authority even before they’re formally hyperlinked. This is, in effect, digital PR — treating link earning as a media relations exercise rather than a link-buying exercise, which we cover in more depth in its own article in this series.

There’s also a growing recognition that unlinked brand mentions — a publication naming your business without a clickable link — still carry SEO and, increasingly, AI-search value, because both Google’s algorithms and AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity increasingly use entity recognition (understanding who and what you are, not just what links point to you) as a trust signal.

The Rise of Unlinked Mentions and Entity Signals

One of the more interesting shifts is how much weight is now placed on unlinked brand mentions — a publication naming your business without a clickable hyperlink attached. Historically these were treated as having little to no SEO value, since they can’t be crawled as a traditional link. Google’s understanding of entities (recognising who and what a business is, independent of link structure) and the rise of AI systems that reference brands by name rather than by URL have both made these mentions more valuable than they used to be. A consistent pattern of credible, unlinked mentions across relevant publications now genuinely contributes to how trustworthy a brand appears to both search engines and AI assistants.

What This Means for Your Backlink Strategy

A few practical shifts we make with clients now, compared to two or three years ago:

Auditing existing backlink profiles for low-quality or parasite-style links and disavowing where genuinely necessary, rather than assuming any link is a good link
Reallocating budget from bulk link-building tactics toward digital PR and original research that earns coverage organically
Prioritising relevance and topical authority of the linking site over raw Domain Authority or Domain Rating alone
Tracking brand mentions and share of voice alongside traditional backlink counts, since both feed trust signals now
Being patient — quality link earning is slower than quantity-based link building, but it’s considerably more durable

A Quick Example

Picture two businesses in the same industry, each spending a similar monthly budget on link building. Business A pays for 40 links a month across a mix of directories and a guest-posting network, most of them on low-relevance sites with modest authority. Business B commissions a small piece of original research each quarter, pitches it to three or four genuinely relevant trade publications, and earns 6-8 highly relevant links plus a handful of unlinked brand mentions in return.

On a spreadsheet, Business A’s link count looks far more impressive. In the current environment, Business B is considerably more likely to see actual ranking movement, because their links carry genuine topical relevance and editorial credibility — exactly what SpamBrain and the recent core updates are designed to reward over raw volume.

How to Audit Your Own Backlink Profile

Pull your full backlink list from a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and sort by relevance to your industry, not just by Domain Authority
Flag links from clearly unrelated industries, foreign-language sites with no connection to your market, or sites that look like link farms
Check for a high proportion of exact-match anchor text, which can look manipulative rather than natural
Review anything sitting on a subdomain of an otherwise unrelated high-authority site — a common parasite SEO pattern
Disavow selectively and deliberately — this is a blunt tool, not something to apply broadly out of caution alone

The Bottom Line

A backlink strategy that would have worked well in 2022 is, in 2026, at real risk of being ignored by Google’s algorithms or actively flagged as manipulative. The businesses seeing genuine ranking gains right now are the ones treating link earning as an extension of genuine authority and coverage — not a volume game. That’s a bigger shift in mindset than it sounds, and it’s exactly why we’ve rebuilt how we approach backlinks for clients over the past year.

If your current backlink strategy still looks like it did a few years ago, it’s worth a second look. Talk to Medium Marketing about a backlink audit.

About

Ethan Caldwell

Reflective Blogger

Dinesh Arasaratnam

Fractional Leader

Dinesh Arasaratnam is the founder of Medium Marketing, a performance marketing agency helping mid-to-large businesses drive growth through strategy, systems, and fractional CMO support. He has advised clients across sectors like energy, eCommerce, SaaS, and education, with a focus on data-driven decision-making and marketing efficiency.

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