The Best Link Building Expert Reveals What Agencies Get Wrong (And What Actually Works in 2026)

---

Written by Nell · Interviewed: Georgi Todorov, Founder of Create & Grow · April 2026 · 8 min read

Georgi Todorov has been building links since 2016. Semrush hired him in 2021 to build their internal link building team from scratch. Before that, he built thrivemyway.com from zero to 100,000 organic visitors a month in eight months, then sold it on Flippa for a six-figure sum. He now runs Create & Grow, where he works with B2B, Tech, and Marketing brands who want links that actually move rankings.

---

The Part Nobody Talks About in Sales Calls

Before we got into anything else, I asked Georgi the question I actually wanted answered: how does someone who has built, ranked, and sold a site with his own money look at the link building industry from the outside?

He didn’t hesitate.

“I spent $50,000 building thrivemyway.com. Every link, every article, I paid for it myself. When it’s your own money, you get very precise about what works. Most agencies have never had that experience. They’re selling a process they’ve never had to stress-test.”

That context matters for everything that follows.

What the Link Building Industry Won’t Tell You

• The metric everyone trusts is broken. High DR and clean backlink profiles no longer guarantee a real, authoritative site. AI content farms have learned to game every number agencies rely on.
• The old playbook is being quietly retired. Contextual placement used to be the standard. In 2026, the bar is narrative integration, links that belong in the story, not just inside it.
• The biggest threat is invisible. AI-generated fake editorial sites now look identical to real publishers. The only reliable filter left is human interaction.
• The mindset shift that separates survivors. Links are a byproduct of authority, not a strategy for building it. The brands chasing metrics and the brands building real presence are headed to completely different places.

When the Vetting Process Actually Matters

Most agencies get this completely backwards.

“They evaluate providers on deliverable counts and turnaround speed,” Georgi says. “Those are exactly the questions a link farm is built to answer well.”

He’s seen what happens on the other side of that decision. Clients come to Create & Grow after paying another provider for months and watching nothing move. The links were real in the sense that they existed, but the sites behind them had no traffic, no real editors, and in many cases, no human beings making decisions about what got published.

The tell, he says, is simpler than most people expect. Ask the provider to explain their process, how they find websites, how they pitch editors, how they verify relevance, in plain language .”If someone cannot explain their process in simple terms, it usually means they are buying links from networks.”

The second signal is editorial control. According to a 2026 link building survey of 518 SEO experts, 89% identified spammy outbound links as the biggest red flag when assessing a site for link placement. Yet most agencies never look at the sites their providers are using. Real editorial relationships look different: real editors ask questions, push back on pitches, and care whether content fits their audience. “A spam network just sends you a price list. That’s the tell.”

The red flag most agencies miss isn’t price or promises, it’s repetition. The same domains appearing across multiple clients is the signature of a link farm. So is a site with a high DR and zero real traffic. It exists for one reason.

“Real link building is slower, relationship-driven, and sometimes unpredictable. If everything looks too clean and too scalable, it is usually artificial.”

The Problem Nobody Is Talking About: AI Spam Farms Look Real Now

Here’s where the conversation got uncomfortable.

I mentioned that most people still treat DR and traffic estimates as reliable filters. Georgi shook his head before I finished the sentence.

“The AI content explosion didn’t just flood the web with noise. It built convincing fake editorial environments that pass every basic metric check. A site can have acceptable DR, reasonable anchor text diversity, and a clean backlink profile while being entirely machine-generated with no human audience behind it.”

This is not a fringe problem. Research from CybelAngel identified entire networks of AI-generated sites ranking in Google’s recommendation systems, complete with realistic author profiles, plausible editorial tone, and zero humans involved in any of it.

What does a real site actually look like in 2026? Georgi looks for verifiable authors with consistent publishing histories, active social profiles that match the editorial voice, and traffic patterns that hold over time. “Spam farms reveal themselves in the data. Sudden publication spikes followed by a crash. No returning audience. No engagement.”

The most reliable test is still human. A 2025 State of Backlinks Report surveying 800 SEO professionals found that 67.5% believe backlinks still influence overall search results, but the emphasis has shifted firmly toward quality and human validation over raw numbers. “When you reach out to a real editor, they ask questions. A spam network replies with a price list.”

“In the AI era, link building is becoming less about metrics and more about human validation.”

Why “Contextual” Is No Longer Good Enough

One of the more counterintuitive things Georgi said came when I asked about contextual links, the thing every agency promises and every client asks for.

“Contextual is the floor now, not the ceiling. A link that’s in an article and a link that belongs in an article are two completely different things.”

He pointed to one of his own client cases to illustrate. Fantasy AI, an AI platform in one of the most restricted niches imaginable, came to Create & Grow sitting on page five for its own brand name. Competitors were outranking it for branded keywords. Negative mentions were appearing above the actual website. The instinct would be to build as many links as possible. Georgi’s team built twenty. But each one was placed where the brand genuinely belonged in the narrative, not bolted onto a loosely related paragraph. In nine months, organic traffic grew from 4,481 to 55,558 monthly visits. An 1,100% increase, with twenty links.

“Most people fail because they build links the way they buy ads, volume, volume, volume. The sites that actually move are the ones where every link had a purpose.”

This is what he means by narrative integration. The strongest placements in 2026 come from content where the brand is genuinely part of the story: a real product comparison that includes your tool, an industry roundup where your data is the source. According to the same 2026 link building survey, 48.6% of SEO professionals now identify digital PR as the single most effective tactic, precisely because it produces this kind of placement rather than bolted-on contextual links.

“The key is not placement but context and credibility. When the author genuinely recommends or references the brand, the link becomes much stronger.”

The Reciprocal Link Debate, Settled

I brought up reciprocal links expecting a standard answer. What I got was more precise.

“The industry has overcorrected on this. Direct link exchanges, two sites agreeing to link to each other purely for rankings, yes, still risky, still rarely valuable. But natural ecosystem linking is completely different and completely normal.”

The example he gave was straightforward: two SaaS companies whose products integrate, publishing a guide on using both tools together, linking to each other. That link exists because it helps the reader understand something real. According to Georgi, the test always comes back to intent: does this link exist to help the reader, or to manipulate the algorithm? That distinction, in his view, is the only one that matters.

Ahrefs data puts a hard number on why this distinction has become so consequential: 66.5% of links built between 2013 and 2024 are now dead, largely because the sites behind them were built for link selling rather than real publishing. The footprints catch up eventually. Forced link exchanges leave patterns in timing, anchor text, and domain pairs. “Google is very good at recognizing patterns.”

“Forced link exchanges leave patterns. Google is very good at recognizing patterns.”

The Shift That Changes Everything

I saved the biggest question for last. If someone is starting from zero today, no authority, no links, no reputation, what does the right approach actually look like?

Georgi went quiet for a moment before answering. Then: “Stop asking how to get more links. Start asking how to become a source that people naturally reference. Those are completely different questions. Only one of them has a future.”

He built thrivemyway.com on the first question, high volume, systematic content, aggressive outreach. It worked in 2021. He scaled it to hundreds of thousands monthly visitors and sold it for six figures. Then Google’s updates changed the game, and sites built on that model started falling. “The proxy broke. That’s the real lesson from that site.”

The deeper truth is that links have always been a proxy for authority. For years you could game the proxy without building the real thing. That window is closing. Research from AirOps and analyst Kevin Indig shows that AI Overviews now feature only around 23% as many URLs as traditional search results, a dramatic contraction of who gets visibility. The brands in that smaller pool are the ones consistently cited, mentioned, and referenced across credible publications over time.

AI search systems, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, don’t rank pages the way Google traditionally has. They pull from sources they recognize as trusted. Links, in that world, are not the strategy. They’re what happens when the strategy is working.

“Build a brand that people naturally reference,” Georgi says. “Links then become a byproduct of authority, not just an SEO tactic.”

In two to three years, the brands that invested in original data, expert participation, and real editorial relationships will dominate both traditional search and AI-generated answers. The brands that chased metrics will find that both channels have closed on them at the same time.

Want to work with Georgi directly? Reach out to his team at Create and Grow