Do Web 2.0 Backlinks Still Work in 2026?

Mostly no. A Web 2.0 backlink is a link from a free site you build yourself on a platform such as Google Sites, Blogspot, WordPress.com or Weebly. The links are often followed, but a new free site has no authority of its own to pass, and Google's link spam systems are built to ignore links created only to influence rankings.

What a Web 2.0 backlink is

"Web 2.0" is an old name for platforms where anyone can publish without owning a domain. In link building it means a specific tactic:

Open a free site on a hosted platform, for example yourkeyword.blogspot.com or sites.google.com/view/yourkeyword.
Add a few short articles.
Link from those articles to the site you want to rank.
Repeat across ten or fifty platforms.

The appeal is that it costs nothing and you control the anchor text. Sellers also point out that the platforms have very high authority scores.

Are Google Sites and Blogspot links dofollow?

Often, yes. In October 2026 we looked at the HTML of public pages on two platforms:

Google Sites. Links to outside websites on the public sites we checked had no rel attribute, which makes them ordinary followed links.
Blogspot. Links in the posts we checked were also plain followed links.

This is the main difference from Medium or LinkedIn, where the platform adds nofollow to everything. Check any platform yourself by right-clicking a link, choosing Inspect and reading the rel attribute. Markup changes over time.

A followed link can still be worthless, for the reasons below. Dofollow vs nofollow links explains what the attribute does and doesn't control.

Why they stopped working

A new free site has nothing to pass. A link passes value from the page it sits on, and that page gets its value from the links pointing at it. A Google Site you made last week has no inbound links, so it has almost nothing to give. The platform's domain score doesn't transfer to your subdomain or subfolder. What link juice is covers how this flows.

Google's systems discount self-made links. Google's spam policies define link spam as links created to manipulate rankings. Since the Penguin update became part of the core algorithm in 2016, Google has mostly ignored such links without penalising the target site. In practice, the usual result of a Web 2.0 campaign is that nothing happens.

The pattern is easy to spot. These sites have a handful of thin posts, no readers, no inbound links, and every outbound link pointing to the same domain with keyword anchors. That's the same shape as a private blog network, built on free hosting.

The free site is the weak page in tiered schemes too. Some sellers now offer Web 2.0s as "tier 2" links that point at your other backlinks. A page with no value still passes none, whichever tier it's in. See tiered link building.

The risks

In most cases the cost is wasted time and money. Three things can make it worse:

Scale. Hundreds of keyword-anchored links from throwaway sites can contribute to a manual action for unnatural links. That's uncommon, but it happens to sites whose link profile contains little else.
Platform removal. Free hosts delete sites that break their spam rules, and your links disappear with them.
Opportunity cost. Time spent building fifty empty sites could have gone into one page that earns real links.

When a free platform site is worth having

You can use these platforms without it being a link scheme. They help when the free site has its own reason to exist:

A real project lives there. Open-source documentation, a course site, a club or a community group. If people use it and link to it, its outbound links carry weight like any other page's.
Brand presence. A profile or simple site under your brand name on a major platform can appear when people search for your brand, which helps you control your brand SERP.
A second audience. A newsletter on Substack or a blog on a developer platform reaches readers who won't visit your main site.

To tell the two apart, ask whether you'd still build and maintain the site if its links didn't count. If you would, go ahead. If the link is the only reason, the site will be thin and Google will treat it as a thin site.

What to do instead

Links that move rankings sit on pages that have authority of their own, and somebody other than you decides to place them. With the same hours you could:

Build one linkable page, such as original data, a free tool or a detailed guide, and tell the people who'd cite it.
Pitch guest articles to sites your audience already reads.
Reclaim what you've earned by finding unlinked mentions and broken links to your site.
Trade links directly with relevant site owners. On Backlinkster you're matched one-for-one with an owner in a related niche, both links go inside real articles on established sites, and a real person checks each swap. The free plan includes five swaps a month.

The best ways to get backlinks in 2026 ranks these options by effort and return.

Frequently asked questions

Do Web 2.0 backlinks still work? Rarely. Links from new, self-made sites on free platforms have little authority to pass, and Google's link spam systems are designed to ignore links created only for ranking. Most Web 2.0 campaigns produce no measurable change.

Are Google Sites backlinks dofollow? On the public Google Sites pages we checked in October 2026, outbound links had no rel attribute, so they were followed. That doesn't make them valuable. A new Google Site has no inbound links, so its links carry almost no weight.

Can Web 2.0 backlinks hurt my site? Usually they're ignored. At large scale, with keyword-rich anchors and few other links in your profile, they can contribute to a manual action for unnatural links. If that happens, disavowing the links is part of the fix.

Is a link from WordPress.com or Blogspot ever valuable? Yes, when the blog is real. Many established blogs run on free platforms, with readers and inbound links of their own. A link placed by the author of a blog like that is an editorial link. The hosting platform doesn't matter.

What are Web 2.0 backlinks used for in tiered link building? They're used as tier-2 links pointing at your existing backlinks, in the hope of strengthening them. Because the Web 2.0 pages have no authority themselves, they add nothing.

The bottom line

Web 2.0 backlinks are free and often followed, and they still do almost nothing, because a site with no authority has none to pass. Use free platforms when you have a real reason to publish there, and get your ranking links from established pages run by other people.