Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Link building that actually works in 2026. Today I’m joined with Charles Flo, who does a lot of different black hat SEO strategies and parasite SEO strategies. A lot of people know him for that, but he actually builds a lot of genuinely decent brands as well. He uses a lot of his intelligence around how to manipulate the SERPs, but he also builds a lot of white hat brands and makes a lot of money on white hat brands, believe it or not. But link building specifically. A lot of people chase do follow links on high DR websites and things like that. Is that still what is working in 2026? Has the game changed? Are branded mentions now more important than ever? People want to get rankings in LLMs, AI overviews and ChatGPT. So let’s jump right in. What link building strategies are working for you now in 2026, Charles?

Charles Flo: Link building for Google specifically right now, the number one tactic is consensus based link building. Essentially, Google has the link graph and it has the exact same thing that it does for documents, it does for domains. So it treats certain domains as being better parts of a topical cluster than other domains. You want to get as many of those domains that are part of that topic cluster to link to you and reinforce your trust signals, your expertise, your authoritativeness and all of that in Google.

Charles Flo: That is E-E-A-T. This is the thing I love reminding people of. E-E-A-T is 99 percent off page. Google is looking for signals from sites that it already trusts and already knows have topical expertise on a subject, and then using those to reinforce your expertise and topical authority.

James Dooley: On that, with regards to E-E-A-T style link building and building up consensus, I feel like over the last two years people have spoken less and less about links. I’m not saying you specifically, but in general. Yet in the last few months it now feels more important than ever, because it is not just about a high DR do follow link anymore. Consensus means you need lots of different referring domains repeating who you are, what you do, your entity, your attributes, your reputation, your awards, your case studies and your testimonials. It all needs to be corroborated on third party sources. Would you agree that link building, or at least third party mentions, has become more important than ever because of AI?

Charles Flo: One thousand percent. I’ve spoken to a lot of Fortune 500 CMOs and COOs that, for the first time in a very long time, are interested in building links, interested in SEO and interested in mentions. It used to be the unfortunate reality that SEO was almost sidelined in the boardroom when it came to marketing budgets and decisions. Especially when there were downturns, it was often the first marketing expense that got cut.

Charles Flo: Now you are looking at companies spending more on AI SEO, more on SEO, more on digital PR, more on link building and more on mention building than on every other type of marketing combined. That is especially true in certain niches where ads are becoming either more restricted or more expensive because of how much control Google has taken over search ads.

James Dooley: Do you know why I think that is? Once you start running ads now, more than ever, people are more inquisitive. They dig deeper with AI. They can ask whether a company is any good, whether it is legit, whether it is trustworthy, and AI can come back straight away saying that it is alright but has mixed reviews, or it is good at this but bad at that. That is massively affecting so many people’s conversion rates.

James Dooley: AI is now doing branding, reputation and recommendation work right at the front end. So link building and building corroboration are not just about getting the enquiry anymore. You need to be the one that people want to choose. AI has almost become a 24/7 recommendation engine and sales engine. Previously, the thinking was get the enquiry and then sell yourself off site. Now, before they even fill in a form or buy a product, they need to feel that you are the best choice for them. That is why third party corroboration and consensus building feel more important than ever. We are doing more in house than we ever have. We are doing more link building and third party corroboration than we ever have across all of our brands.

Charles Flo: I’m sure it is working amazingly as well. The ROI you can get out of it is pretty spectacular in certain industries and niches. Traffic itself is becoming more valuable as ad clicks become more expensive. That means SEO campaigns, long term traffic and long term AI recommendations can produce an ROI that is pretty unheard of in other marketing channels.

James Dooley: So let me break it down. We are talking here about link building that works in 2026. I’m going to list a few different link building strategies and you can say whether it is yes or no. Digital PR, newspapers and magazines. Is that working in 2026?

Charles Flo: Yes, one hundred percent. The issue is that the space has become too full of digital PR agencies focused on irrelevant campaigns. They will work with a random ecommerce website selling tech products and create something like best Halloween costumes for dogs in 2026, then try to get loads of journalists and newspapers to cover it. I would much rather have something relevant to the website where you can actually build topical authority, entity recommendation and co-occurrence around the brand than these irrelevant digital PR campaigns that are just chasing domain metrics.

James Dooley: Internally, our link building methods now have become an expansion of our semantic content network. When we are doing a topical map, we say here is what we want to cover, here are the entities and attributes we want to reinforce, and now we need to cover these off site to re-emphasise and reaffirm what we are saying on our site. On to the next one. Guest posts. Are they more important than ever with you guys? Are they working in 2026?

Charles Flo: They are working fantastically if you do them properly. The main issue again is that too many people do not put enough time into the guest post content. They are just spinning up five hundred word AI articles and sticking them on a site. Going back to entity stacking and AI validation, you should use the content from the guest post to reinforce all of those things, to rank for keywords, to get signals, to get links and to reinforce that domain and that link for months and years to come.

Charles Flo: Most of the time, people are just spinning up an article, sticking it on the domain and moving on to the next link. That leaves so much value on the table. It is like going to KFC and just eating the skin off the chicken and leaving the chicken in the bucket. It is ridiculous.

James Dooley: For sure. Internally, with regards to semantic content, entity stacking and that kind of thing, I’m not really too bothered about DR and do follow as much anymore. I’m more bothered about confidence and clarity. Those are the two things we are focusing on. How confident is the content in the entity and the attributes of what we do, and is it ranking? Confidence, clarity and ranking. Because then it forms part of query fan out and manipulating AI overviews, but also building consensus within Google and Bing. I’m going to go a bit further down. Niche edits or link insertions. How important are they for link building in 2026 or have they become less important?

Charles Flo: No, I think they are still very important. It is less about content quality there and more about due diligence. Most people are not doing the proper research. They are not taking the time to find the pages they can get links on that are actually really powerful for their site.

Charles Flo: I would spend an extra five, ten or fifteen minutes per link to look at other links on the website, the pages that are ranking, the keywords, the link profile, the traffic charts, whether metrics are being faked and so on. Then do page level due diligence too. Is that page ranking? What keywords does it rank for? Does it have Wayback history? Does it have high outbound links or low outbound links? There are lots of things you should check.

Charles Flo: If you do that heavy due diligence on your link insertions, the ROI and the impact will be significantly higher. Right now, a lot of people are picking niche edits that get neutralised because they are too easy for Google to detect. Whereas if you do the extra work, some content editing, maybe update the page, maybe add an image, all of that changes how Google processes that niche edit. You get a much better result. Because links are becoming more powerful and root authority is so powerful, I would argue that when you pick the right niche edits, they are more powerful than they have ever been before.

James Dooley: I completely agree. If you get added to a listicle that is already being seen as a trusted source and that information is being used within LLMs, that niche edit is a brilliant way of doing it. But some people are just blindly ordering fifty niche edits because they want do follow links in irrelevant articles, and I think that is worthless now. Again, it comes back to confidence, clarity and rankings. If it has those and you can add your brand into it naturally, it works brilliantly. Press releases then. You do a press release, it gets syndicated out to hundreds of websites. Maybe only ten or fifteen rank, but they could form part of consensus building. What are your thoughts on press releases in 2026 for link building?

Charles Flo: For link building specifically, I am not a huge fan of them as a direct authority or ranking source. I do think, especially when you are doing entity stacking, they can be fantastic for something like the social fortress that Koray talks about. They help reinforce social profiles, citations, and make sure those links are counted and validated, which helps your entity scoring, validation and knowledge graph understanding in Google.

Charles Flo: As a source of ranking power or authority though, I am not a huge fan. That said, Google is favouring them more this year than in previous years.

James Dooley: What about some lower quality stuff like blog comments, GSA, RankerX, Money Robot, SEO Neo, web 2.0 backlinking and all that? I know a few people are doing it now as tier two or tier three, but they are improving the content being placed. Some of those pages are indexing. They may only be on page three or page four in Google or Bing, but they are still forming part of the consensus, and for AI they can help with getting cited. However, from a link building strategy point of view, is it only worth it for LLMs but not for links, or what would you do?

Charles Flo: In terms of automated link building, I would never point it directly at a money site unless I am doing a churn and burn project. There are some secret sauce methods where you can use canonical methods and other aggressive automated campaigns to make it work on money sites.

Charles Flo: With everything else, even with tier twos, I would stick to tools like SEO Neo or something similar where you are getting higher quality contextual links. Tools like GSA and Money Robot often build non-contextual links, which are neutralised ninety nine percent of the time. So if you are going to go down that route, I would stick to contextual automated link building.

Charles Flo: The fact that we now have AI to write incredible articles without human editing means you can build pipelines that output genuinely strong content. That adds to the rankability, indexability and visibility of those articles and those web properties.

James Dooley: What about PBNs for link building in 2026?

Charles Flo: PBNs are having a bit of a comeback. I think it is because of how Google is treating root authority and domains. If you can get homepage links, there are fewer anti-spam filters and systems than there used to be. A lot of the things that used to remove equity or treat those links as toxic are gone. As a result, homepage PBN links are working fantastically.

Charles Flo: A lot of people think of PBNs and think of Black Hat World, Fiverr, forums and marketplaces. Most of the time those services will eventually get you burned through association. Someone else using that network badly will get caught, then a manual reviewer looks at the links and you get caught through guilt by association.

Charles Flo: If you can go to private vendors or people with exclusive niche private networks, those are hitting like a truck right now. If anything, they are significantly cheaper than buying links through bloggers and publishers, because those prices have gone so high. A lot of PBN vendors will still sell a post for fifteen dollars.

James Dooley: You mentioned homepage links there. What about sitewide or homepage rentals, like sponsorships? Since there is no semantic content around them, are you not that interested in those or are they working well?

Charles Flo: They work very well in non-English markets. Exactly because of what you said. In those other languages, the algorithms have weaker semantics and weaker NLP, so those links work fantastically. In English we have not seen them work as well unless you are using some more aggressive canonical methods.

James Dooley: What about aged domains? Are you doing anything with aged domains? Personally, not really at the moment, because we have seen other tactics working better over the last couple of months, especially with subdomains and canonicals.

Charles Flo: We have still seen aged domains rank particularly well in international search. The interesting thing is that relevance does not really seem to matter in some cases. You can pick up a restaurant domain in Greece that used to be a Greek restaurant, with Greek menus and a Greek homepage, and it will rank in Thai casino search. There does not need to be any relevance match whatsoever.

Charles Flo: They are working less and less in English though. About six months ago they were smashing it in English too.

James Dooley: What about 301s or canonicals?

Charles Flo: We use 301 redirects and canonicals quite heavily. Mostly it is to rank in SERPs where other black hats are ranking with other black hat techniques. It is not like we are going into a super clean white hat SERP and using redirects and canonical subdomains to rank. It is generally for dirtier SERPs.

Charles Flo: Again, that is probably because of consensus. Google sees that everyone else is doing redirect spam, so it assumes you must be doing redirect spam to rank as well. Whereas if you went into life insurance or something very clean, where everyone else has a high authority, trusted site, your 301 redirect spam probably is not going to work.

James Dooley: And then in local SERPs, what about local directories, citations, Google stacks and cloud stacks?

Charles Flo: I do not do much local SEO at all. In the last ten years, I have probably done three local SEO campaigns and verified one Google Business Profile in total. With that said, I have seen that it works very well.

Charles Flo: There are two or maybe three reasons why. Number one, local SERPs often have lower competition. So any links whatsoever can give you an advantage over competitors with DRs of two, three or zero. Number two, AI can still be influenced by those different models, outputs and algorithms. And the third reason is with AI map packs. You are going to end up with limited information building the consensus in those local map packs. The more information you can stack into the local search environment, the more likely you are to have your map listing pulled into the AI output as well.

James Dooley: Right. So link building that works in 2026. I am going to shamelessly allow you to plug PressWhizz now. You have got one minute on the stage to tell people what someone should be doing in 2026 for link building. I am going to allow you to mention PressWhizz, explain who they are and what they do, and also if there are three strategies you would focus on in 2026.

Charles Flo: PressWhizz is the fastest growing link marketplace of all time. We scrape all of our inventory. We currently have our own internal search engine which lets you search for niche edits. We have blacklisting, competitive backlink analysis and integrations with Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and all the tools you would need. We have a growing inventory. Right now we have about 38,000 websites on the platform and we are adding 120 publishers a day. So every 24 hours when you log in, there are 120 new publishers you can buy links from. That will continue expanding over the next few years.

Charles Flo: We also offer Reddit mentions, tier two link building, entity stacking services and a bunch of managed services as well.

James Dooley: So if I know nothing about PressWhizz and I set up an account, if I log in am I able to see the domains, the prices and say I want that one and that one? Can I upload my own content or do you provide content services too?

Charles Flo: When you first sign up, your account is locked, but you can still search ten publishers at a time. You can see the full domain, and it is fully transparent. We do not hide anything. You can see pricing, offers, guest posts, link insertions, special categories and all of that.

Charles Flo: You can upload your own content or choose for us to write the article for you. There are different article levels, depending on whether you want a basic or premium article. We also do tier two link building, so when you build a link we can tier two blast that for you as well.

James Dooley: And if I am looking for relevance, can I search by category, like roofing or home improvement, and bring back what you believe are the most relevant sites in that space?

Charles Flo: Yes. We have main categories such as home improvement, gardening and so on. What I like to do is select the category first, then put in the exact keyword you want to rank for, like roofing. It will then return every website in the home improvement category that also has at least one page with the keyword roofing on it, so you know they already have some topical relevance to your site.

James Dooley: Perfect. So anyone watching this, I hope you liked the video on link building that works in 2026. Make sure you check out the links in the description. There are several other episodes I have done with Charles on selection rate optimisation, AI SEO and advanced SEO strategies that are working right now in the SERPs and within the LLMs. Charles, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Charles Flo: Thanks, mate.