How to Get Backlinks: Where Our Six Sites' Strongest Links Came From

Where our six sites' strongest backlinks came from

We run six sites: Submitator, IndexMachine, ShareSpeak, AlterBase, AffyList and Solvitor. Ahrefs lists the 100 strongest live referring domains of each, ordered by Domain Rating, and with the six linking each other set aside, 590 remain. 192 of them send a followed link. Keep the ones rated DR 50 or higher and count them site by site, and you get 117 followed backlinks from 61 different sites.

Directories and launch sites are 46 of the 61 strong sites and send 99 of the 117 links. A directory we submit to links to 2.7 of our sites on average; every other strong source links to 1.2. 80 of the links come from 30 directories in the catalog we submit to; another 16 directories and launch sites outside our list add 19. Everything else is thin: two news and article sites, three newsletters and publishing platforms, seven tools and products and three others.

That is the shape of the strongest links on small, young products, the stage this post is written for. Below DR 50 the profiles get noisier, and our post on how many referring domains a site needs reads each of the six in full, with its rating and its count.

The directories that linked to the most of the six

Cut the same data by directory and a short list does most of the work. Uneed links to all six of our sites; Startup Fame and Show My Sites to five; Findly.tools and TryLaunch AI to four. The table holds every directory we submit to that sends a followed link to three or more of them.

Nine of these 17 ask for their badge on your site and two make it optional, and a directory that asks for a badge can take the listing or the followed link back when the badge disappears. Uneed, Show My Sites, TryLaunch AI, DeepLaunch, PeerPush and MicroLaunch ask for no badge, on our record.

Link building strategies for SEO, ranked by cost and by who decides

Every way to get a backlink has two prices: what you pay, in money, hours or code on your own site, and the decision you hand to someone else. A directory publishes by rules it prints before you apply. An editor decides after reading your pitch, and a community decides after reading your post. The table runs from the link building techniques where a published rule decides to the ones where one person does. They are the best ways to get backlinks for a product with few links so far, and the same ways increase backlinks on a site that already has some.

How to build backlinks, one way at a time

1. Directory and launch-site listings

A directory prints its price before you apply: a badge on your site, a link back, a place in a queue or a fee. That makes it the first stop and the nearest thing to easy backlinks: you can read the deal, judge it and say yes without anyone at the other end knowing who you are. On our record, 116 of the 189 directories we submit to pass a followed link, 32 want a badge on your site, 10 make one optional and 147 ask for no badge.

Where a directory sells a paid route, it sells speed or placement. TryLaunch AI's pricing page lists a Pro launch at $39 under “Full promotion”, with a line that starts “Skip the queue”. Before you list anywhere, run the directory through the four tests a directory link should pass, then pick by category among startup directories, SaaS directories and AI tool directories. Some publish with no queue, and some ask for no badge on your site.

2. Launch platforms: Product Hunt and Hacker News

A launch buys a day of attention, and the link is the smaller part of it. On the 17 product pages our Product Hunt guide read on 18 October 2026, the Visit website link was tagged ugc. A new Hacker News story is nofollow until it earns roughly twenty points, by our count of 178 stories. Launch for the visitors and the feedback. What a Product Hunt launch does for SEO is a post of its own, and the Product Hunt alternatives are compared by the link each one gives.

3. Integration and partner pages

If your product connects to another one, that product's integrations or partners page is the warmest ask in link building: listing you helps its own customers, so the partner already has a reason to say yes. The price is the integration itself and one email with a logo and two lines of copy. The platforms you build on are worth the same email when they keep a showcase of what their customers made.

4. Free tools and resources people link to

A free calculator, checker or template earns links from the people who use it and from the writers who send their readers to it. It costs build time and upkeep, and it keeps earning while people search for what it does. Submitator keeps two of its own: a Domain Rating checker and a link preview checker.

5. Original data and research

Numbers nobody else has get cited: a survey of your users, a benchmark, a count from your own product. The source table at the top of this post is the kind of thing that travels, built from six Ahrefs exports and a catalog match. Each writer who borrows a number decides whether to credit it with a link, which is why the numbers have to be worth borrowing.

6. Journalist requests and podcast guesting

Services that pass journalists' questions to sources trade an expert answer for a mention, and the publication decides on the link. A podcast guest spot usually comes with a line in the show notes, which the host writes.

7. Unlinked brand mentions

Search for your product's name in quotes, leaving out your own site. A page that names you without a link is the easiest ask there is: the author already chose to write about you, and adding the link is a one-minute edit. Set an alert so new mentions reach you while they are fresh.

8. Broken link building and resource pages

Resource pages, the lists of tools and guides that blogs and communities keep, link out by design. Find one in your niche with a dead link, make sure your page does the job the dead one did and tell the owner: you save them a broken link, and they decide on the replacement. When your product fits a list and nothing on it is broken, a plain request still works on the ones that take suggestions.

9. A competitor backlink gap

Ask a backlink tool for the sites that link to two or three of your competitors and not to you, then sort the list by who decides: listings you can apply for, partners you can email, articles you can pitch. For a young product much of that gap is directories and launch sites, going by our own data above. Check each target with our free DR checker before you spend an hour on it, and run your own page through the preview checker so the listings that read your title and image get them right.

10. Communities: Reddit, Indie Hackers and forums

Communities rank for the very question this post answers: a Reddit thread in r/SEO is the first result Google shows for how to build backlinks. They are places for answers, not links. Moderators decide what stays up, and Indie Hackers, for one, is nofollow on our record. How to get backlinks from Reddit, in practice, is to be useful in a thread and let the readers, and the writers among them, find you.

Link building tips: how to get good backlinks, not just more

Most of what people mean by quality backlinks comes down to a few checks, whichever way the link arrived:

• Read the link on the live page. A followed link carries no nofollow, ugc or sponsored, and dofollow vs nofollow explains the difference.
• Make sure the page that links to you can be indexed, and help a listing page get indexed when it is not.
• Keep the conditions. A badge or a link back that vanishes in a redesign can take the listing with it.
• Count sites, not links: how many you need depends on the pages you are up against.
• Judge a site by its readers and its own links before its rating, and read what counts as a good Domain Rating before you sort by it.
• Local backlinks, the citations a business with an address collects, are a job of their own; this post is about products sold online.

How to get backlinks for a new website: the order to do it in

Most people who type “how to build backlinks to my website” into Google are at this stage: a new site and no record. So start where no record is needed. A directory judges a new product by its published rules; an editor asked to link a product nobody has heard of has every reason to wait. The order runs from rules to judgement, and each step gives the next one something to point at.

Free and paid: how to make backlinks on any budget

Every way above can be done without paying anyone. The cost is time and, on badge directories, code on your own site; the free routes, site by site, are in our list of sites with a free route.

Money buys three things. Speed or placement on one directory, such as TryLaunch AI's $39 Pro launch. Someone else's hours on the forms, across many directories at once: Submitator is $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, paid once. Or an agency's time on outreach, priced per placement; agencies that resell links under their own name are the subject of our post on white label link building.

How to do link building: what to skip

The shortcuts fail the same test: nobody at the other end chose the link.

• Software that creates the links itself, in blog comments, forum profiles or pages it controls. Where Google draws its line on automated programs is read stage by stage in a post of its own.
• Links traded in bulk. What Google's policy says about link exchanges, and where a directory badge fits, has a post to itself.
• Directories that are link lists and nothing else. Google's spam policies have a line on low-quality directory links, and our post on web directories reads it next to the directories people use.
• Profile and comment links in bulk: profile links are rarely followed, whatever the site's rating.
• A number as the goal. The count you need comes from the pages ranking for your keyword, not from a monthly quota.

How to get more backlinks to your website from directories, done for you

Directories gave our six sites most of their strongest followed links, and they are also the most repetitive work in link building: each has its own form, its own description length, its own image sizes and, often, its own badge. Submitator does that part. You choose directories in the dashboard with each one's DR in front of you, from the 189 we submit to, and nothing goes on that list before a submission to it has worked from start to finish.

From there the work is ours. Every directory gets a description of its own, the forms get filled in and the CAPTCHAs on them never reach you. Every badge your picks call for loads from one component on your site, and we keep all of them live: no commit per directory, however many badges you end up with. On every order we also push your listing pages through IndexMachine, the free indexing every plan includes ($25 value), with nothing for you to set up; whether Google indexes a page is Google's call.

Most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours and every directory within 21 days at most. A rejection earns you a replacement by default, one more directory of your choice; All Directories has none to give, since it holds the whole catalog already. A refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms.

Starter is $29 for 30 directories, Growth $49 for 60 and Scale $79 for 100, each paid once; All Directories, at $149, covers the whole catalog and whatever joins it. One Pro launch on TryLaunch AI costs $10 more than our 30-directory plan. That is how to get backlinks to your website from the source our own sites drew their strongest ones from, without filling in a single form.