How to get your first ten backlinks

A new site's problem is not ranking. It is being found at all: Google discovers most new sites through links from pages it already crawls. The first links exist to get you crawled, and to put your name where people and assistants read it.

• Most of the links below carry a nofollow attribute. That is fine: the audience and the mention are the point at this stage.
• None of them is bought, traded or automated, so none of them touches Google's link spam policy.
• Ten links will not make you rank for a competitive search. They will make you exist.

Start here because there is nobody to convince. These are links on profiles and pages that already belong to you.

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   1. Your own profiles

   The website field on every profile you own: the code host, the professional network, the social account, the community accounts, the newsletter. Use the exact same URL everywhere, with https and no trailing variation.

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   2. Your code and your packages

   If you publish anything open source, the repository description and README link to the product page. Package registry pages rank on the package name and carry the link with them.

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   3. Anywhere you already write

   A personal site, an old blog, a conference bio, a university page, a past employer's team page. Ask for the link to be updated to the new product where it is fair to do so.

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   4. Your other product, if you have one

   A genuine link between two products you run is honest, as long as it helps a reader. One link in the footer or the about page, not a network of cross-links.

Worth: little ranking value on their own, and real value in getting the domain crawled in days rather than weeks.

These accept submissions by design. Choose the ones with real audiences and skip the rest, because Google's policy names low-quality directories directly.

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   5. The directories that matter in your category

   The alternatives directory, the software review sites, and the category listing everyone in your field checks. One line about what the product does, a screenshot, the URL. A handful of good listings beats fifty submissions.

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   6. The launch sites

   The daily product community, the maker communities, the pre-launch lists. Most links are nofollow; the traffic and the mention on a page that keeps ranking for your product name are the payoff.

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   7. The resource lists in your field

   The maintained "tools we use" and "best X" lists. Find them with search operators, check they are read by humans, and send one specific suggestion with a reason.

Worth: brand searches, a first trickle of qualified visitors, and pages that name your product when an assistant goes looking for options in your category.

These take a real conversation or a real artefact. They are also the ones that still matter in a year.

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   8. A partner or an integration

   Anyone your product connects to has a page listing what connects to them. Build the integration page on your side first, then ask theirs to list you. This is a link between two products that genuinely help each other's users.

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   9. One honest answer in a community

   Find the thread where somebody is asking the question your product answers. Reply properly, say you built the thing, and link only if the link is the answer. Once, not ten times a day.

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   10. One thing worth citing

   A free tool that does one job, or a figure from your own data. This is the only item on the list that keeps earning links after you stop working on it, which is why it is worth starting in week one even though it lands later.

Worth: the first links from pages a person would recognise, which is the only measure of a link programme that means anything.

The money is the smaller loss. The larger one is that these links make your profile look bought at the exact moment you have nothing else in it.

The list above is a week. The programme that follows is a habit, and it is mostly three things repeated.

• Check monthly for people naming your product without linking it, and ask, once, politely.
• Watch the sites that link to your two closest rivals and not to you, and work down that list.
• Keep making the one thing worth citing better, whether that is the tool or the study.

Track it in Search Console's Links report and in whichever backlink index you use, and judge it in referring domains a person would recognise, not in totals. Ten real ones in a month is a good month for a product nobody has heard of yet.