How to get free backlinks, no tricks

Before asking for a single link, have something to link to that isn't your homepage. Proprietary data, a small study with your own numbers, a simple free tool, a downloadable template, or an honest comparison work far better than a generic article about your industry.

It's the difference between asking for a favor and offering something. Without this step, the rest of the playbook gets much harder: nobody links out of politeness, they link because it serves their audience.

Search for your brand name, your founders' names, and your product names on Google and in mention monitoring tools. It's common to find articles, interviews, or press mentions that name you but don't link to you.

Write to whoever published it, thank them for the mention, and ask, without pushing, for a link to the relevant page to be added. It's one of the tactics with the best success rate because you're not asking for new coverage, just completing something that already exists. You can track this systematically with mention monitoring.

Look for resource pages, comparisons, or roundups in your industry that link to content that no longer exists (shut-down tools, deleted articles, expired domains). Those are broken links the page owner usually wants to fix.

Let them know about the broken link and, only if it genuinely makes sense, suggest your content as a replacement. It works because you're solving a problem for them, not just asking for a favor.

Services connecting expert sources with journalists (the ecosystem left behind by HARO, now spread across platforms like Connectively, Qwoted, or Featured) publish daily requests for sources for articles in trade and general media.

Responding with a specific, useful, verifiable quote, not a generic one, is what earns the mention. Most of these requests get buried under filler responses: a specific answer backed by your own data stands out immediately.

Almost any B2B software, vendor, or service you use day to day has a testimonials or customer case page, and many link back to whoever wrote it.

If the testimonial is honest and specific (what problem it solved, what result you got), it's common for them to ask permission to publish it with your name, title, and a link to your site. It's one of the fastest, cheapest ways to earn a legitimate link.

A joint webinar, a co-written guide, a cross-interview, or a shared promotion with a business that serves the same customer but doesn't compete with you generates a natural link in both directions.

The key is that the collaboration makes business sense on its own, beyond the link. If the relationship wouldn't survive without the link involved, it's probably closer to a link scheme than a real collaboration.

Specialized forums, niche Slack or Discord communities, industry subreddits, Stack Overflow if it's technical. The rule is simple: contribute first, link only when it genuinely answers the question.

A link left as a genuinely useful answer to a specific question is perceived (and works) completely differently from the same link dropped in a hundred unrelated threads, which is comment and forum spam, exactly what we describe in bad backlink practices.

This isn't about signing up for hundreds of generic directories, it's about identifying the ten or fifteen your industry actually consults, whether general (Google Business Profile), vertical (G2, Doctoralia, Idealista, depending on the case), or institutional (professional associations, chambers of commerce, trade bodies).

It's the same principle we cover in depth, with a directory table and a sector map, in the local business authority guide.

If your business is in Dénia or the Marina Alta, you don't need to start from scratch: our local backlinks library already has those directories researched, verified, and prioritized.