What type of links are currently working?

[Prerit_Modi]

Hello,

I have a keyword ranking on position 8 from the last 2 months. I have created 3 Web2s and 2 Profiles but the ranking is not boosting even to 7. So, I want to know which type of backlinks are currently working and I can only build free links currently due to finance problem.

If anyone knows then please share.

[tangor]

Keywords are one thing. Links are another. Yes, they can be symbiotic, but they remain separate parts of the indexing experience.

[Dr_Doomain]

As Nutterum said, currently article (or guest posting) to local media sites/magazines work best. These are all paid links, some have a sponsored tag, some don't, but according to my experience, they work equally good. Free guest posting only have a 1-4% response rate, and it's very time consuming.

[wheel]

Getting back into link building after some time off. I see no reason to expect that what I've done in the past won't still work.
1) guest blogging, but only on high end blogs that generally don't accept paid blog posts. I offer them some content, but I offer to write it first, and if they like it, they publish and if they don't, pass. Do that on a couple of blogs and you can use those articles as a reference for the next blogger you approach. I typically stay away from blogs that accept sponsored/paid posts though.
2) Drop some high quality content. Then aggressively seek out sites that may have an interest in linking to you, approach them individually and ask for a link. This is brutal work, time consuming, high failure rate, but it produces links that are untouchable by anyone else. e.g. unique historical stuff is great linkbait and gets links from authoritative sites. 1000 pages of historical data for your industry that can't be sourced anywhere else, that can get you links from industry organizations, research sites, stuff like that - sites that don't link to commercial websites. These days I wouldn't spew those link requests around since I'd expect the success rate to be pretty much 0. But, still worth hitting up the places that would never link to you, because they might link to historical content. And if you approach 10 and get one, you just nailed a link that nobody else can get.
3) I keep mostly clear of artificial links, but. Look for really authoritative sites that have really old link lists. Check the sites that they link to. Find one that's defunct. Offer a few bucks for it. Rebuild the site, and give yourself a link. So you end up with Authority Site-->'not my site' new site -->your site. Only worth doing IMO if both the authority site and the site you're buying is super high quality. e.g. I found a gov't website with an old directory on it, and the directory links to a website that's unmaintained. Hoping to buy the unmaintained website, put up some decent content that includes a link to my money site. Boom, one step away from a gov't link.

[wheel]

Speaking of ^^^^ this post, I run a forum. Yeah, I'm that old, as is everyone who posts there. I just set it up from the ashes of a forum that used to be extremely active, to the tune of 50k users and millions of posts across decades. That burned and died, so I set up a new forum for some folks that still wanted a forum venue. The vast majority of other posters screwed off to discord and reddit.
Spammers are becoming a pita. they come in as a new poster, and post something entirely generic. Legible, but pablum, and do a couple link drops.
They've recently upped their game. They post something horribly generic without links. Then they come back after time has passed, and edit their post to add the links. Harder to catch.
I've also seen them tag teaming. Two of them, both with one or two pablum posts, one posts something the other responds with a link drop.
Their's some footprints. They're real people posting for sure, (or decent AI stuff). They visit, but their first post isn't for a day or so. And their registration email address is always something really really old like a yahoo or aol email address.
The spammers are common enough that the forum users have started a thread where they see who can be the first one to point out a post from the spammers.

[phranque]

They're real people posting for sure, (or decent AI stuff).

as a forum moderator, so far i am N for N when identifying that a newbie has posted AI content in this forum.
in most cases these posts have shown to be 98%+ fake using the GPT-3 detector.
a very few have only scored 85ish% fake.