How Do I Get Backlinks? Seven Routes for a Site Nobody Has Heard Of

A backlink is a link from someone else's site to yours, and the only durable way to get one is to give somebody a reason to link. That sounds like a platitude until you work through the alternatives, because every shortcut is either a policy violation, a paid placement that has to be marked and therefore passes nothing, or a tactic that stopped working when the platform behind it closed.

So the useful answer is a shortlist. Seven routes still earn editorial links to a new site. Most take months. One of them is not a link-building tactic at all: it is starting on a domain that other people already linked to years ago, which is a different move with different conditions attached.

What counts as a backlink worth having?

Two distinctions do most of the work, and getting them wrong wastes a lot of effort.

Referring domains, not backlinks. One site putting your link in its footer on ten thousand pages is ten thousand backlinks and one referring domain. The domain count is the number that matters, and referring domains versus backlinks is the long version.

Editorial, not placed. A link a person chose to add while writing about something is worth having. A link you inserted into a profile, a comment or a paid post is not, and Google asks that paid and user-generated links carry rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc", which means they were never going to count anyway. Dofollow versus nofollow covers what the attributes do.

Everything below is aimed at the first kind. How backlinks work covers the mechanism underneath.

Where do first links actually come from?

In rough order of how reliably they work for a site with no audience.

1. Publish something with a number in it. Original data, a survey of your own customers, a benchmark you ran, a price comparison you maintain. Journalists and bloggers link to the source of a figure because they have to. This is the single highest-yield thing a small site can do, and it is the least popular because it is real work rather than outreach.
2. Be a supplier, customer, employer or member of something. Partner pages, integration directories, member listings, case studies your vendors write about you, the university you sponsor. These are unglamorous, genuinely earned, and the fastest first links most businesses can get. Make a list of every organisation you already have a relationship with and ask.
3. Build a free tool. A calculator, checker or converter in your subject earns links for years because people link to a thing they can use. It also costs a week of engineering, which is why it filters out most competitors.
4. Digital PR. Pitch a story, not a link. This works when you have something in category 1 to pitch and fails reliably when you do not.
5. Speak, write or appear somewhere with a bio. Podcasts, conference speaker pages, industry association profiles, expert quotes. Many are nofollow, which is fine: they are how the people who write about your subject find out you exist, and the editorial links follow from that.
6. Fix somebody's broken link. Find dead pages in your subject that other sites still link to, publish a genuine replacement, and tell the people linking. It has a low hit rate and it is honest, which is a better combination than most tactics.
7. Start on a domain that already has links. Covered below, with the conditions.

What about guest posts, directories and HARO?

Guest posting is not dead, but it is not a link tactic. Writing a genuine article for a publication whose audience you want is fine. Buying a slot on a site that publishes anything for a fee is a paid link, and Google's spam policies list "exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links" as link spam.

Directories are worth a small amount of effort and no money. Your industry association, your local chamber, the two or three real directories in your niche. Bulk directory submission services are on the same policy list.

HARO is gone. Cision folded Help a Reporter Out into a platform called Connectively and discontinued it on 9 December 2024. Advice written before then still recommends it. Successor services exist and journalists use social platforms directly; the tactic survives, the specific tool does not.

What Google's policy rules out

One sentence covers most of it. Google defines link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings", and the examples include buying links, trading goods or services for links, automated link generation, requiring a link in terms of service, and low-quality directory or forum links with optimised anchor text.

Read the definition rather than the list, because the list is illustrative. The test is the primary purpose. A link you got because somebody found your work useful passes it. A link that exists because you paid for it, swapped for it or generated it does not, whatever the tactic is called this year.

Anchor text is the visible tell. A natural profile is mostly your brand name, bare URLs and phrases like "this study" or "here". When a third of your anchors are the same commercial phrase, the pattern was built rather than earned.

How many do you need?

Fewer than the tools imply, and from better places. There is no threshold. What the data shows is that the counts that matter are large and long-run: SE Ranking's study of 129,000 domains found that sites with over 32,000 referring domains were 3.5 times more likely to be cited by ChatGPT than sites with up to 200. That is a statement about the top of the web, not a target. For a new site the useful goal is a first dozen from real organisations in your subject, because that is what moves you from zero, and zero is the only number with a special property.

To see where you actually stand, check any site's backlinks free walks through the free sources, and the backlink checker will list who links to a domain with the source page and anchor text.

Using the Revised directory for this

Route 7 needs its own section because it is a different kind of decision.

Every link a site earns, it earns on a domain. When the site shuts down and the domain expires, the pages that linked to it do not know: a university library's resource list or a Wikipedia citation stays where it is until an editor changes it. That is what our directory catalogues. Expired domains with a link history, available to register, with the evidence published before you reveal the name.

How to use it for this specifically:

1. Open the directory and set Basics to your TLD and, where the classifier has one, your subject category.
2. In Quality, set a referring-domain band that clears your bar and a minimum Agent Citability score. Agent Citability is our published measurement of how deeply a domain is referenced by the kinds of sources answer engines cite; it ships as versioned releases and a score can fall between them.
3. In History, require a real archived record and a recent availability check, so you are not shortlisting a name someone has already taken.
4. Read the Linked by column on the shortlist. Who links to a domain matters more than how many do. Start from a source hub if you would rather work backwards: expired domains with .edu backlinks, .gov backlinks or Wikipedia backlinks are three reference types no amount of outreach will get you quickly. Edu and gov backlinks covers where the real ones come from.
5. Check the subject matches before you spend a reveal. This is the condition the whole route depends on.

Filtering, sorting and search are free whether or not you are signed in; reveals are what a plan buys, so shortlist first.

The condition, plainly. Google's expired domain abuse policy covers domains "purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users". Its examples are all subject mismatches paired with thin content: affiliate pages on a former government site, casino content on a former school. A real site on a domain whose history is close to your subject is not that, and Google's own announcement said it is "fine to use an old domain name for a new, original site that's designed to serve people first". What the policy actually says has the verbatim text, and what to do with an expired domain covers the options once you own one.

FAQ

How do I get backlinks for free? Publish something with original data in it, list yourself with organisations you already have a relationship with, and build a free tool in your subject. Those three cost time rather than money and produce editorial links. Paid links have to be marked and pass nothing.

How long does it take to get backlinks to a new site? The first handful, from partners, suppliers and associations, can happen in a week because you are asking people who already know you. Links from strangers follow publishing, and that is measured in months.

Do I need to pay for backlinks? No, and buying them is on Google's link spam list. A bought link that is marked correctly passes nothing, and an unmarked one is a policy violation you are carrying.

Are nofollow links worthless? No. They do not pass ranking credit, but they bring readers, and the people who write about your subject discover you through them. A profile that is entirely nofollow is a weak profile; a profile with none at all looks unnatural.

Is buying an expired domain a way to get backlinks? It is a way to start with them rather than build them, and it works when the domain's subject is close to yours and you put a real site on it. When those two things are not true it is the exact scenario Google's expired domain abuse policy describes.

How many backlinks do I need to rank? There is no number. Rankings depend on the query, the competition and the rest of your site. The honest target for a new site is the first ten referring domains from real organisations in your subject.