How to get backlinks for a new website: the safe ones that count
Safe backlinks for a new site: moderated launch listings, links earned by useful assets, unlinked mentions and real pitches. Plus what counts as link spam.
LLaunchScaler·Published ·9 min read
The safe backlinks for a new website, in the order to pursue them, are listings on launch platforms and curated directories that are indexed and moderated, links earned by something worth citing (a free tool, original data or a thorough guide), existing mentions of your brand turned into links, and editorial pitches to sites that publish in your category. Avoid everything Google's link spam policy names: links bought for ranking without rel="sponsored" or nofollow, link exchanges and networks, and mass submissions to low-quality directories.
A new site has no authority to lose, which makes it tempting to take any link offered. The ones that help are the ones a real editor or a real reader chose.
Which backlinks are safe for a new website?
A backlink is safe when a person chose to place it and the page it sits on is indexed and relevant to your product. It is risky when it exists mainly to pass ranking credit: bought, swapped, automated or dropped into a template across many sites. The table ranks common sources for a site with no authority yet, by effort and safety.
Link source
Effort
Safety
Typical link
What it needs from you
Launch platforms
Low
Safe
Followed or nofollow, depending on the platform's terms
A live product and the platform's condition (queue, badge, votes or a quality bar)
Questions, answered
What people ask about this
01
How do I get backlinks for a brand new website?
Start with listings on launch platforms and curated directories that are indexed and moderated, then earn links with something worth citing, such as a free tool, original data or a thorough guide. After that, ask sites that already mention you to add a link, and pitch articles to sites that publish in your category.
A polite request to someone who already wrote about you
Reviews on blogs and newsletters
Medium
Safe if disclosed
Varies; paid ones must be qualified
Free access and a short pitch
Linkable assets: tools, data, guides
High
Safe
Followed, editorial
Something other sites want to reference
Editorial guest articles
High
Safe without optimized anchors
Editorial
A useful article for that site's readers
Paid placements and sponsorships
Money
Safe only if qualified
sponsored or nofollow
Budget, and a host that labels the link
Link exchanges, networks, mass directory blasts
Low
Link spam
Anything
Nothing you should give
The attributes matter as much as the source. A nofollow, sponsored or ugc link still sends visitors and helps people discover you, but Google says links marked this way "will generally not be followed." The difference is covered in nofollow vs dofollow, and which attribute belongs on which kind of link is in rel=sponsored, ugc and nofollow.
Where should a new site get its first backlinks?
Get the first links from launch platforms and curated directories, because they accept a new product on its merits and publish a page about it that gets indexed. Before you submit anywhere, check that the listing pages are indexed, that a person reviews submissions, and that the link to your site is followed or at least sends real visitors.
Run each check yourself in a minute:
Search site:theplatform.com yourcompetitor in Google. If competitors' listing pages come up, listings get indexed.
Read the submission terms. A moderated queue, a quality bar or a review step means the platform chooses what it lists, which is what makes a listing worth having.
Open a live listing, view its source, and find the link to the product. No rel attribute, or a rel without nofollow, sponsored or ugc, means it is followed.
Check the condition attached to the link, such as a badge on your site, a vote threshold or a months-long queue.
LaunchScaler's free listing works this way: a URL is the only thing it asks for, and the listing earns 1 dofollow backlink to your site once the site passes the readiness scan, so the followed link depends on the site's quality rather than on payment. The launch platforms that give a dofollow backlink compares the link terms of the main platforms, and whether launch badges help your SEO covers the badge trade that several of them ask for. Paid featured slots on these platforms are a separate decision, judged in is a featured placement worth it.
Skip the services that submit you to hundreds of directories at once. Google's spam policy names "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as an example of link spam.
How do you earn links with assets, data and tools?
Build one thing other sites in your space would cite if it existed, then tell the people who write about that topic. Links earned this way are editorial by definition: someone chose your page as the best source for a point they were making. It takes more work than a listing and it keeps producing links after you stop pushing.
What tends to get cited for a small SaaS:
A free tool that does one job from your product's domain, such as a calculator, a checker or a generator, on its own URL that needs no signup.
Original data: a benchmark from your own usage, a survey of your users, or a public dataset you cleaned and published with the method.
A reference page that answers a question fully, with the steps, the numbers and the edge cases, better than anything ranking for it now.
Templates and examples people copy and credit.
Then promote it to people who already cover the topic: authors of recent articles on the subject, newsletter writers and the maintainers of "best X" lists. Getting into those lists is its own process, covered in how to get into best-of articles. Reviews work in a similar way; see how to get your product reviewed.
How do you turn unlinked brand mentions into links?
Find pages that mention your product or company by name without linking to it, and ask the author to add the link. The author already chose to write about you, so the request is small and the link, once added, is editorial. For a new product the list is short, which makes this a quick monthly task.
Search Google for your brand name in quotes, excluding your own site: "yourbrand" -site:yourbrand.com.
Repeat for your product name, your founders' names and distinctive feature names.
Open each result and check whether it links to you.
Write to the author or editor with the page URL, the sentence that mentions you and the exact URL to link to. Keep it to three or four sentences.
Record who you asked and when, and follow up once.
The full method, including how to find mentions in places search does not surface well, is in unlinked brand mentions.
Is guest posting still a safe way to get backlinks?
Guest posting is safe when you write a genuinely useful article for a site that chose to publish it, with a natural link where it helps the reader. It becomes link spam when it is done at scale for the links. Google's policy lists "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites" among its examples.
The safe version looks like normal journalism: pitch an idea to a site whose readers are your buyers, write the piece to that site's standard, and link to your product with your brand name or a plain URL rather than a keyword like "best invoice software." If a site charges for publishing, the link is paid and should carry sponsored. The line between the two is drawn in detail in guest posting in 2026.
What backlinks should a new website avoid?
Avoid any link whose main purpose is to move rankings rather than to inform a reader. Google defines link spam as "creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings," and its list of examples is specific enough to use as a checklist before you agree to anything.
Google's examples include:
"Buying or selling links for ranking purposes," including "exchanging money for links," exchanging goods or services for links, and "sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link."
"Excessive link exchanges" and partner pages that exist only to cross-link.
"Using automated programs or services to create links to your site."
"Text advertisements or text links that don't block ranking credit," and advertorials that pass ranking credit.
"Low-quality directory or bookmark site links."
Links hidden in widgets distributed across sites, "widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites," and forum comments with optimized links.
Paying for exposure is not the problem. Google says "buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes" and is allowed "as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value." If you inherited a profile with spammy links, toxic backlinks and disavowing explains when to act and when to leave it.
How do you check the backlinks you have?
Start with Search Console's Links report, then use a third-party index for competitor data. The Links report lists your top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text, but it is "a sample of internal and external links," its tables are "limited to 1,000 rows," and it "doesn't specify if a link is marked as nofollow."
For more detail, third-party tools crawl the web and estimate each linking site's strength. Treat their scores as estimates, not Google's view: Domain Rating explained and Spam Score explained cover what the two most quoted numbers measure. Backlink checker tools compares the free and paid options, and finding your competitors' backlinks turns their profiles into a list of sites worth approaching.
Should you pay someone to build backlinks?
Pay for the work, never for the links. An agency or freelancer is worth hiring when they pitch real sites by hand, show you every placement, and refuse to promise a number of links or a metric by a date. Anyone offering a fixed bundle of high-DR links for a fixed price is selling what Google's policy calls buying links.
Ask for a list of the sites they would approach, sample placements from past work you can open and check, and a written statement that no host site is paid for the link. What a good engagement delivers is laid out in link building for startups, and the wider choice of whether to hire an SEO agency at all is in SEO agencies for startups.
Get editorial placements pitched by hand
If you would rather not run outreach yourself, LaunchScaler's SEO / GEO / backlink boost does it for you, from $299 and scoped to your site. Its guest placements are editorial pitches to sites that actually publish, with a link a human approved, alongside structured-data fixes, answer-engine work and technical off-page clean-up such as lost backlinks and broken citations. You get every placement and every fix linked and checkable, and LaunchScaler never fabricates signals or buys spam links. Nothing is charged to ask: send an inquiry and you get a scope and a quote within one business day. Talk to us.
02
How can I get backlinks for free?
Free launch listings, curated directories, converting unlinked mentions of your brand, and publishing a tool or dataset other sites want to reference all cost time rather than money. Several launch platforms give a followed link on their free route, usually with a condition such as a queue, a badge or a quality bar.
03
Are paid backlinks against Google's rules?
Buying links for ranking purposes is link spam under Google's policies. Paid placements are allowed when the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", which Google accepts for advertising and sponsorship.
04
How many backlinks does a new website need?
Google does not publish a number, and the count matters less than where the links come from. A few links from indexed, relevant, editorially chosen pages are worth more than hundreds from directories nobody reads.
05
Should a new website submit to hundreds of directories?
No. Google's link spam policy lists low-quality directory or bookmark site links as an example of link spam. Choose a handful of curated, indexed directories that are relevant to your product instead.
Domain Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 logarithmic score of a site's backlink profile. Google doesn't use it, and a link's worth depends on the page it sits on.
A featured placement is worth it when you know where it shows, for how long, that it's labelled, who sees it and what it reports. How to judge a paid slot.
Find competitors' backlinks with link intersect: sites linking to two or more competitors your size but not you. Free tools, link types, what you can get.
