What people mean by web 2.0 links
The term describes a link from a blog you created yourself on a free platform. Because anyone can create one in minutes, the tactic has been used to build networks of throwaway blogs whose only purpose is to link somewhere.
Those networks do not work any more, and they have not for years. A blog with three posts, no visitors and an outbound link to a commercial site is a pattern that is trivial to detect at scale.
The legitimate version
A free blog is useful when it is a real publication that happens not to be on your own domain: a project log, a side interest, a regional blog that covers something you know about. It gets posts over time, it gets readers, and a link from it is a link from a site with a reason to exist.
This is worth doing when you would have written the material anyway. It is not worth doing as a link-building exercise, because the amount of work required to make the blog credible is the same amount of work that would have earned better links elsewhere.
National platforms are the exception worth knowing
In several markets the local blogging platform still carries weight that the international ones do not. Blogg.se in Sweden and Blogg.no in Norway are read, indexed and linked to domestically in a way that a generic international platform is not.
If you operate in one of those markets, the local platform is a better home for a genuine blog than the global default.
What we have catalogued in this category
Our own dataset holds 20 platforms of this type. 95% of them pass a following link, and 95% are ones a beginner can complete without prior accounts or a verified business.
| Market | Platforms |
|---|---|
| 🌍 International | 12 |
| 🇸🇪 SE | 5 |
| 🇳🇴 NO | 2 |
| 🇩🇰 DK | 1 |
Counts describe our catalogue rather than the web as a whole. We publish the numbers, not the list: the list is the product.
3 of these are on the free tier
No payment and no card. These are the ones you can open and work through today, and they are a fair sample of how the rest are written up.
| Platform | Market | Link | Difficulty | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blogg.se | 🇸🇪 SE | dofollow | Easy | 30-45 min |
| Blogg.no | 🇳🇴 NO | dofollow | Easy | 30-45 min |
| Tumblr.com | 🌍 Intl | dofollow | Easy | 15-20 min |
Examples of this kind of platform
Names most practitioners would recognise, to make the category concrete: Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, Blogg.se, Blogg.no.
Common questions
Do web 2.0 backlinks still work?
As part of a private blog network, no. As a link from a blog that is actually maintained and read, yes, in the same way any other blog link works.
How many posts does a free blog need before it is credible?
Enough that it looks like a publication rather than a container: a handful of posts on a consistent topic, published over weeks rather than in one sitting.