- The sole r/SEO topic thread that appeared in 2026 exposed all backlinking techniques, from cold email outreach to paid links, from podcast guest appearances to stock image uploads, and from entity-based backlinks to brand mentions, eliciting over 150 replies from practitioners.
- The research keeps pointing towards the same conclusion: relevance and referral traffic are more important than sheer quantity of links as Google and AI platforms increasingly use Reddit as their source of content.
“How do you get backlinks?” was the one question asked in the r/SEO subreddit forum that resulted in 150-plus comments and gathered the traction necessary to be discussed in episode 1,120 of the Build In Public Podcast, available on YouTube under the channel @buildinpublic. It was analyzed by the host of that particular video, commenting on each of the top-rated answers. One person had posed that question on behalf of a relative who had competitors with 500 to 1,000 backlinks, while he himself only had three.
For him, cold emailing was useless because there was very little chance of getting a response from it; what he actually needed was advice on how to get five to ten decent links within a month without wasting time sending emails that won’t result in anything. The remarkable thing about the discussion in this thread was not the question but the variety of answers given, all stemming from personal experience.
Four Answers at the Top, and Not One of Them Is Wrong
The top comment mapped out four options: earn links naturally once you already rank, buy them if you know what you are doing, run link outreach and guest posting campaigns, or build your own sites and use those as sources. A repeat podcast guest, brought a different angle entirely. As mentioned by the host based on his comment, his strategy was two-fold: create content for niche websites and then reach out to the editorial team, and then appear in industry podcasts and gather links from their show notes and platform lists. The lesson that he reiterated many times was that good backlinks come from relationship and credibility, not paid access.
Podcasts, Photos, and the Brand Entity Theory
Podcast guesting kept coming up as a method, not as a side note but as a recurring answer from multiple commenters. The host points to aipodcastmatcher.com for connecting guests with hosts, and claims he landed 30 podcast appearances in three months before he had any name recognition in the space, specifically for the SEO value, using a guest-to-host matching service to find shows.
The comment from present safety 512 took a sharper left turn. The Redditor walked through a process of uploading original photos to free stock platforms like Unsplash, Pixabay, and Flickr, with attribution fields pointing back to their site.
From there, the commenter moved into the entity theory that has been gaining traction in practitioner discussions, suggesting that Google brand mentions anywhere online, down to an Instagram reel caption, could feed topical authority once Google has a clear enough picture of what a brand is.
The Relevance Argument Has Already Won
The host’s final read on the thread went straight at the original poster’s concern about that 500 to 1,000 backlink gap. His argument was simple: chasing raw link count is a distraction. High-intent keywords at the bottom of the funnel attract less competition because the search volumes are smaller. Google, without a more relevant page to serve, hands the ranking to whichever result fits best.
Three highly relevant backlinks pointing to a page that answers intent precisely can beat a competitor sitting on hundreds of loosely related links. That framing holds up against broader research. Rasa Sosnovskyte, an SEO and digital growth strategist featured at BrightonSEO and CEO at Growth Bite, addressed this directly in a LinkedIn post published July 24, 2026: the most expensive way to run an SEO campaign is to build backlinks without a niche as the filter.
Her post spelled out that Google and LLMs read everything a link comes with, including the surrounding text, the page it lives on, the category it sits in, and where it points. A SaaS linked from a home decor site, she wrote, sends no useful signal to any engine.
What Reddit’s Search Dominance Actually Means for Link Strategy?
Discussing backlink strategy on Reddit carries a specific irony the research makes difficult to set aside. Google visibility of Reddit has increased around 1,900% from 2024 onwards, as reported by PrestigeLinks, and the March 2026 core update continued this trend. To see three to five Reddit forums when searching on page one for a competitive search keyword is not surprising at all; these forums come up before the review sites and vendor websites.
Google’s 2024 data licensing deal with Reddit, through which it is said that Google was paying Reddit about $60 million per year for real-time access to its content, commercially cemented their relationship. Google went further with that and in May 2026, AI Overviews and AI Mode started sourcing advice excerpts from Reddit posts attributing the response to the original username.
Reddit’s backlinks are set by default as nofollow links marked as rel=”ugc” since they are related to user-generated content and are not capable of transferring any PageRank in a classical manner. Nevertheless, as proven by Reddit link building studies from Crowdo, Reddit possesses a domain rating of around 94, and a relevant post in a subreddit is capable of driving hundreds or even thousands of visitors.
Perhaps more interesting still is an example provided by Tessar Napitupulu of Forbes Agency Council in an article published in July 2026. The author created an index, collecting over 680 million citations made by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude from August 2024 to April 2026. According to this index, Reddit became the most mentioned source among all AI models, being the source of about 40% of all citations. Moreover, an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands revealed a correlation of branded web mentions with AI Overview mentions of 0.664 compared to 0.218 for backlinks.
Reporters and writers are known to seek story inspiration on Reddit, and that is why an interesting thread can create dofollow backlinks from legitimate news sources even if no further action is taken. It is a fact that reporters will search for information on Reddit, use the content, and mention it in their articles. A nofollow link that triggers that chain ends with a dofollow link from a publication that carries real authority.
What 150 Comments on One Thread Actually Reveal?
None of the tactics this community described are new. Guest posting, digital PR, podcast guesting, expert quote platforms, image attribution outreach, niche event networking: all of it has been in the toolkit for years. What 150-plus responses signal is something more telling. Practitioners are quietly running every tactic through a filter they rarely name out loud: does this link actually make sense for this business to have?
The host’s take on paid links captures that shift: spending on a placement that also drives referral traffic sits closer to what Google actually wants than spending purely to collect a link. A Beta List launch that pulls real product signups is a different kind of asset than a directory listing that never sends a click.
Different tactics, different commenters, different starting points; the community keeps landing in the same place. Links that fit the business, on indexed pages that ideally get clicked, from sources with stable traffic and no sharp drops, remain the baseline worth building toward.
Backlinks are just one aspect of that process. Contemporary SEO processes often merge link qualifications with internal links, technical audits, and citation optimizations with the help of artificial intelligence instead of completing them separately. Recently, we have discussed how Claude SEO skills may be used to automate those processes and build scalable workflows for content audits, internal linking, and visibility in Google Search and AI-driven search engines.
The Real Work: Stop Counting Links and Start Qualifying Them
Five to ten good quality links a month without having to purchase any one of them is a practical goal to set for yourself. The host and the thread comments lead to the exact same actions: answering one journalist question a day on help a reporter out, source of sources, featured and quoted, doing podcasts for the industry, contributing original photography to the stock websites that link back to you from there, networking through an event, partnership or even podcasting yourself, and pitching unique publications.
Keywords that relate to buying or conversion behaviors with high intent but low competition are continuously undertargeted; most websites ignore them. Using this keyword in the title tag, H1 tag, URL and the opening sentence, while complementing it with only a few relevant backlinks will outrank your competition that has 500 links to a page that does not fully answer what the searcher intended. This is the difference in backlink numbers. Bridging it won’t necessarily be the difference-maker.
