Free backlinks for startups, without a penalty
Every founder is told to build links and nobody says which ones count. Here is how to tell, and where to get the ones that do.
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- SpacerrApps
- Published
- Reading time
- 4 min read
A new domain has no authority. Nothing you publish ranks, because nothing links to you, and nothing links to you because nothing ranks. Links are how you break that loop, and for a startup with no budget almost all of them have to be earned rather than bought.
Buying them is also the fastest way to lose. A paid link that passes ranking credit is a link scheme under Google's spam policies, and the penalty lands on the whole domain rather than on the page that carries it.
What counts as a real link
Two checks, both of which take ten seconds.
Is it followed? Open the page that links to you, view source, find your URL, and look at the rel attribute. If it says nofollow, sponsored or ugc, the link passes nothing. It can still send traffic, which is a real thing to want, but stop counting it as SEO.
Would the page exist without the link? A page whose only content is a list of outbound links is a link farm, and Google worked those out around 2012. A page with an article on it that happens to mention you is worth fifty of them.
That second test kills most of what shows up when you search for free directory submission sites. The lists of "450+ high DA directories" are lists of link farms. Submitting to all of them is a week of work for a footprint that looks exactly like every other spam campaign.
The eleven that are worth doing
Roughly in order of effort against return.
1. Your own product's data. Anything you can publish that somebody would cite: a survey of your users, a benchmark, a price comparison you had to build anyway. This is the only source on the list with no ceiling.
2. Directories that write about you. A listing with real prose on it is an editorial page, not a link farm entry, and it can rank for something other than your name. This site does exactly that: a directory page plus a written article per app, both followed, free. Submit yours.
3. AlternativeTo. Free, followed, and permanently useful. It is one of the ten directories worth the hour.
4. Your stack's showcase pages. Every framework, host and payment provider keeps a page of things built with it. Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, Bun, Astro and most of the rest take submissions and almost nobody sends one.
5. Open source. Publish one genuinely useful thing under your organisation's name. Awesome lists, package registries and the READMEs of anybody who depends on it will link back for years.
6. Podcast interviews. Small shows are desperate for guests and every episode page carries a link. Ten emails gets you two recordings.
7. Being a source. Journalists ask for quotes on public request services daily. A two-paragraph answer from a named founder gets published surprisingly often, and news domains carry weight nothing else on this list can match.
8. Communities you are already in. A profile on Indie Hackers, a well-received Show HN, a detailed answer on Stack Overflow. Most are nofollow, and they still bring the traffic that causes the followed links.
9. Integration and partner pages. If your product connects to another product, ask to be listed on their integrations page. It costs one email and the link is from a domain in your exact category.
10. Your customers. A badge or a "built with" mark that customers put in their own footer is the only source that compounds without more work from you. Give it away free to everybody. The moment it is tied to a paid plan it becomes a widget link scheme, and that penalty points at your domain.
11. Guest posts, written properly. Not the spun kind. One good article for one relevant site, where you would have wanted to write it anyway.
What to avoid
| Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|
| A package of 500 links | A spam footprint on your domain |
| Private blog networks | A manual penalty, once it is found |
| Comment and forum drops | Nofollow, and you look like a bot |
| The same anchor text everywhere | The clearest unnatural-link signal |
| Link exchanges at scale | Named in the spam policies |
The anchor text one catches honest people. If forty sites link to you with the identical phrase you want to rank for, that pattern does not occur in nature. Let people link with your product's name, or with the page title, or with "this thing".
How long any of it takes
If you are wondering whether directory links still count at all, that question has its own answer: do directory submissions still work.
Nothing here works in a week. A new link is typically crawled within days, and its effect on where you rank shows up over the following two to three months. That lag is the reason so many founders buy links: the honest version has no feedback loop for a quarter.
Do the ten-hour version anyway. Eleven real links from pages that would exist without you beat six hundred from pages that would not, and they do not have to be removed later.
The one to do today
Pick the source that leaves a page rather than a mention. A listing with an article attached is worth more than a leaderboard entry, and it is still there next year.
Submit your app and it gets a directory page and a full write-up, both followed, on the free tier. A person reads every submission before it is published, which is what makes the link an editorial judgement rather than an open directory entry, and it is the reason the link is worth having at all.