Growth guide

What are backlinks?

The plain-English version, for people who build products rather than optimise them. What a backlink is, why Google counts it as a vote, and how to get your first fifty without buying a single one.

A backlink is just a link from someone else

Strip away the jargon and it is the simplest concept in SEO: a backlink is a link on another website that points to yours. If SaaSHub lists your product and the listing links to your homepage, that is a backlink. If a blogger writes about your tool and links to it, that is a backlink. If someone posts your URL in a forum, that is a backlink too — a weak one, but one.

You do not control them, which is exactly the point. Every word on your own website is something you wrote about yourself. A backlink is the only kind of SEO signal that requires someone else to act.

Anatomy of a link

<a href="https://yoursite.com" rel="nofollow">your product</a>
     └── where it points        └── whether it   └── the anchor text
                                    passes value      Google reads

Three things decide what a link is worth to you: who is hosting it, whether it passes authority, and what words it wraps. Everything below is a variation on those three.

Why Google treats links as votes

Google's founding insight was that the web already contains a huge, constantly-updated opinion poll about which pages are worth reading — you just have to count the links. If lots of trusted sites link to a page, that page is probably good. Twenty-five years and thousands of algorithm changes later, that assumption is still near the centre of how search works.

What a link actually buys you

Three things, in order of how quickly you feel them. Referral traffic: real people clicking through, sometimes within hours. Discovery: crawlers find new sites by following links, so your first backlinks are often how Google learns you exist at all. And authority: the slow, compounding effect on your rankings and your Domain Rating, which is what makes everything else you rank for possible.

And why it is the one thing you cannot fake

You can write your own title tags, your own copy, your own schema markup. You cannot write someone else's link to you. That asymmetry is why backlinks stayed load-bearing while every other on-page trick got devalued — and it is why they are the hardest, slowest and most valuable part of SEO.

Dofollow vs nofollow — the only jargon you need

Dofollow

The default. No special attribute on the link. It passes authority to your site, which raises your rankings and your Domain Rating. This is the kind you are actually building when you say you are “building backlinks”.

Examples: G2, Capterra, most niche SaaS directories, guest posts, awesome lists.

Nofollow

Carries rel="nofollow", which tells Google not to pass authority. Still sends real traffic, still builds brand, still worth doing — it just will not move your DR. Two cousins do the same job: sponsored for paid placements and ugc for comments and forum posts.

Examples: Product Hunt, Crunchbase, Reddit, most social profiles.

Do not chase only dofollow

A backlink profile made up of nothing but dofollow links is not what a real, organically-growing site looks like — and Google knows what real looks like. Nofollow links from big platforms make your profile credible, send you visitors, and frequently get scraped and republished elsewhere as dofollow links. Aim for a natural mix, and weight it toward dofollow when you have to choose.

What separates a great backlink from a worthless one

Not all links are equal, and the gap is enormous. Six things decide where a link lands on that scale.

Authority of the linking site

A link from a site everyone trusts carries more weight than one from a site nobody has heard of. It is the difference between a reference from a professor in your field and one from a stranger on the street — both are technically endorsements, only one changes anyone's mind.

Relevance to your niche

A link from a SaaS directory to a SaaS product is a signal. A link from an unrelated recipe blog to the same product is noise, and increasingly Google treats it as such. Relevance has quietly become as important as raw authority.

Dofollow status

Only dofollow links pass ranking authority. Nofollow links still send traffic and still belong in a natural profile — they just do not push you up the results.

Where the link sits on the page

A link inside the body of a page, surrounded by relevant words, counts for more than one buried in a footer or sidebar template that appears on 10,000 pages.

How many other links share the page

Authority is divided among the links on a page. Being one of ten curated picks is worth far more than being entry 847 on a directory that lists everything.

The anchor text

The clickable words tell Google what your page is about. A natural mix — your brand name, your URL, a few descriptive phrases — looks like the internet. Fifty links all reading 'best project management software' looks like you bought them.

How to actually get backlinks

Ordered by how fast they pay off for a site with no profile yet. Start at the top — the bottom half does not work until the top half is done.

01Directory and marketplace listings

Low effort · fast

The obvious starting point, and the reason it is obvious is that it works. Directories exist specifically to list products like yours, so there is no pitch, no relationship and no rejection to manage — you fill in a form and, within anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, you have a link. Free, repeatable, and there are hundreds of them. This is how essentially every indie product builds its first fifty backlinks.

02Badge and 'featured on' swaps

Low effort · instant

Many directories give you a permanent dofollow link in exchange for displaying their badge on your site. Two minutes of work for a link that lasts as long as your homepage does. Keep it to a handful — a footer stuffed with badges stops reading as social proof and starts reading as a scheme. We run one of these ourselves: put our badge up, we verify it, and you get a dofollow link from us for nothing.

03Curated lists and awesome repos

Medium effort · 1–2 weeks

GitHub 'awesome-x' lists, subreddit wikis, community resource pages, newsletter roundups. Hand-curated, sparing with their outbound links, and therefore genuinely powerful. Read the contribution guidelines, submit a real entry that fits the list, and do not pitch — these are maintained by people who can smell marketing from orbit.

04Comparison and alternative pages

Medium effort · ongoing

Sites that publish 'best X tools' or 'alternatives to Y' roundups need products to fill them. Many will add you on request; most accept submissions. Bonus: the traffic from these pages is people actively shopping, which makes it some of the highest-intent traffic you can get.

05Something worth citing

High effort · months

Original research, a public benchmark, a survey, a free calculator, a genuinely definitive guide. Ordinary blog posts earn nothing. Things other writers need in order to make a point earn links passively, for years. If you cannot summarise it as 'we found out X and nobody else has published that', it will not attract links.

06Being a guest

High effort · months

Guest posts, podcasts, expert quotes, journalist requests. Slower and more personal, but the links are excellent and the relationships outlast them. Wait until you have a story worth telling — numbers, a launch post-mortem, a strong contrarian opinion — because the pitch is really about that, not the link.

One practical note that saves hours: write your product copy once — a one-liner, a 50-word blurb, a 200-word description, your logo, five screenshots, your categories — and reuse it across every submission. Most of the time cost of directory listings is rewriting the same thing forty times.

What not to do

Buying links in bulk from a marketplace — Google's spam systems are built specifically to spot the pattern.
Private blog networks. Cheap, fast, and the single most reliable way to earn a manual penalty.
Link exchanges at scale. Trading a link or two with a genuine partner is fine; a spreadsheet of 200 swaps is not.
Comment and forum spam. Nofollowed, ignored, and it makes you look like a bot.
Exact-match anchor text everywhere. Natural profiles are messy; over-optimised ones stand out.
Spammy directories that list anything for $5. A link from a site Google has already discounted is worth exactly nothing.

The common thread: every shortcut on that list is trying to buy the one thing that only means anything because it cannot be bought. The slow version is not slow because SEO is unfair — it is slow because the difficulty is the entire signal.

Backlinks FAQ

Fifty backlinks, none of the forms

We hand-pick the directories that fit your product, submit to every one of them by hand, and send you a report when it's done. Natural mix of dofollow and nofollow.

Get listed on 50 directories

Not ready for that? Take one dofollow backlink from us, free →