Has Anyone Changed Their Approach to Link Building in the Last Year

I've noticed that link building strategies seem to change every year. Some methods people swore by a while ago don't seem to get mentioned as much anymore.
For those actively building links today, what has changed in your process?
Have you stopped doing anything that used to work well? Or is there one approach you've found to be more reliable than the rest?
I'm not looking for anyone's secret strategy just interested in hearing what's actually working for people in 2026 compared to a few years ago.
Looking forward to hearing different perspectives.

Biggest change for me is I stopped chasing “any indexed domain with DA” type links. Those still move needles sometimes, but they also vanish, get deindexed, or just sit there doing nothing. More reliable now has been boring niche edits on pages that already get traffic + small digital PR style stuff where the page actually ranks for something. Also stopped buying huge guest post packages, most of those networks are too obvious now and you can see the same author boxes/templates everywhere.

Anchor text is another one... I go way softer than I used to. Brand/URL/partial mostly, then let internal links do more of the exact match work. Not sexy, but it lasts longer.

In my opinion, this year's trending strategy isn't about having a new tactic to replace everything, but rather that Google will be more stringent in evaluating the context and quality of links.

The biggest change for us has been focusing on authority instead of link volume.

We're putting more effort into relevant editorial placements, brand mentions, and links from websites that are genuinely trusted in the niche. At the same time, we're spending more time improving content, internal linking, and technical SEO before building links.

It has been delivering much more consistent results than simply building more backlinks.