Is privacy-policy page link building a new trend?

I been doing some competitor research, and I have noticed abnormal spike in backlinks they get to their privacy-policy pages. Does anyone know if this is a fairly common practice nowadays, if it's even a legit link building practice, or just some fluke?

My speculation is: It's a safe way to get more backlinks without risking any penalties since its GDPR page especially after multiple Core updates.

Let me know your thoughts, i'm genuinely interested if this is a legit practice.

Delossi said:

My speculation is: It's a safe way to get more backlinks without risking any penalties since its GDPR page especially after multiple Core updates

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This doesn't make much sense in my opinion. There's nothing more unnatural than sending links to a privacy policy page. It's a very unusual page to link to. So, doing it as a way of preventing getting penalized would not work.

The sites with such links, how are they performing? How do the links these the privacy policy pages compare to links to homepage and other pages?

Thank you for your thoughts!

I'll provide more details regarding this:

It's e-commerce websites that are using competitor's tool (email marketing tool) to collect data on various visits to their site. And we are talking about Europe Union market, which has strict GDPR regulations. Websites have to be transparent with the tools they use that "may" collect the data, and thus they link the tool "competitor's website" and in addition, a link to their privacy policy page.

If anything, this sounds like a most natural way to include a backlink.

Privacy policy page link building? Honestly, it's not really a good SEO practice. Google usually does not value these utility page links (privacy policies, terms of service, etc.) because they don’t provide quality content for users. If the links come naturally, like from GDPR compliance sources, it’s fine, but don’t expect any ranking boost. It’s more of a coincidence than a real strategy.

Privacy Policy link building is not a new trend, but it has gained attention as a gray-hat tactic for acquiring backlinks—often with mixed results.

I don't think it's good practice in SEO platform.