How to Get Backlinks for Free for a New Website (11 Methods That Work)

A new website has zero backlinks, which means Google has no third-party signals to judge whether it is trustworthy or relevant. This is why new sites often struggle to rank even when their content is genuinely good.

The fastest way to fix this is to build backlinks: links from other websites pointing to yours. Paid link building exists, but most new sites do not have the budget for it, and many paid options carry risk anyway.

Here are 11 methods that are free, sustainable, and effective, ranked roughly by how much impact they deliver relative to the effort involved.

1. Broken link building

Effort: Medium | Impact: High

Find pages on established websites in your niche that link to resources that no longer exist. Reach out to the site owner, tell them about the broken link, and suggest your content as a replacement.

How to do it:

1. Find a popular resource page or guide in your niche. Search: your niche "resource page" or your niche "useful links"
2. Use a free tool like Check My Links (Chrome extension) to scan the page for broken links
3. If you find a broken link pointing to content your site covers, note it down
4. Email the site owner: mention you were reading their page, found a broken link, and have a live resource covering the same topic
5. Keep the email to one paragraph. No attachments.

This works because you are fixing their problem, not just asking for a favour.

Real example: Brian Dean at Backlinko built much of his initial domain authority using this exact technique before he had any budget, reaching out to broken links on university SEO resource pages and getting links from .edu domains with high authority.

2. Source journalists through HARO and similar platforms

Effort: Low to Medium | Impact: High when it lands

Journalists need expert sources for articles and often link back to your site when they quote you. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) connects you with those journalists three times a day.

How to do it:

1. Sign up at helpareporter.com (free tier available)
2. Check the three daily email digests for queries in your niche
3. Respond quickly. Competition is high and writers pick sources fast, often within the first two hours
4. Keep your pitch short: who you are, why you are a credible source, your specific answer to their question
5. Include your website URL in your signature

A quote in a news article can earn you a link from a domain with years of authority that would otherwise be impossible to get.

Alternatives in 2025: Qwoted, Featured.com, SourceBottle, and Connectively (HARO rebranded).

3. Guest posting on relevant blogs

Effort: High | Impact: High

Writing a guest post for an established blog in your niche earns you a backlink, typically in the author bio or within the content. The key is targeting blogs that are genuinely relevant and have real audiences.

How to do it:

1. Search: your niche "write for us" or your niche "guest post" or your niche "contribute"
2. Read several posts on the target blog to understand their style and audience
3. Pitch 2 or 3 specific article ideas that fill a gap in their existing content. Do not pitch topics they have already covered
4. Write to their standard. Quality posts get accepted. Thin or self-promotional ones get rejected and can damage your reputation

A link from a relevant mid-authority site in your niche is worth more than a link from a high-authority site in a completely unrelated industry.

4. Create content worth linking to without any outreach

Effort: High upfront | Impact: Very high over time

The most durable free link building approach is publishing content people naturally want to link to, because it is the best resource on the topic.

Types of content that attract links without outreach:

• Original data or research. Conduct a survey, compile statistics from public sources, or publish original findings. Other writers cite these.
• Free tools. A simple calculator, template, or tool that saves people time. Even a basic spreadsheet template gets linked to.
• Industry studies. Aggregate publicly available data and publish the analysis.
• Definitive guides. Not a roundup, but a genuinely thorough explanation of a complex topic that becomes the reference people point to.

Once you have created this kind of content, you still need to promote it, but the promotion is much easier because you are sharing something genuinely useful.

What this looks like in practice: When Ahrefs published their study “We Analyzed 1 Billion Pages, Here’s What We Learned About Content Marketing,” it earned thousands of backlinks because it contained original data nobody else had. The content did the work.

5. Reclaim unlinked brand mentions

Effort: Low | Impact: Medium to High

If your business, product, or content has been mentioned online without a link, you can often turn those mentions into backlinks with a short email.

How to do it:

1. Set up a Google Alert for your brand name, product name, and your own name
2. When a mention appears without a link, find the editor’s or author’s contact details
3. Send a brief, friendly email: thank them for the mention and ask if they would mind adding a link. Most authors do it immediately because it takes 30 seconds and you are not asking for anything unreasonable

6. Get listed on resource pages

Effort: Medium | Impact: Medium to High

Many websites maintain resources or useful links pages that list helpful content in their niche. Getting listed earns you a free, relevant backlink.

How to do it:

1. Search: your niche "resources" or your niche "useful links" or your niche "recommended reading"
2. Visit each page and check whether your content would genuinely fit
3. Find the contact email for the site owner or editor
4. Send a short email explaining what your resource covers and why it would be useful to their readers
5. Link to your specific resource page, not your homepage

7. Submit to relevant free directories

Effort: Low | Impact: Low to Medium

Some directories carry genuine authority and send relevant traffic. The key is being selective. Spammy directories can harm your site.

Safe, worthwhile free submissions:

• Crunchbase (businesses and startups)
• AngelList or Wellfound (startups)
• Product Hunt (software products or tools)
• G2 and Capterra (SaaS products)
• Clutch (agencies)
• Local Chamber of Commerce directory (local businesses)
• Industry association directories relevant to your niche

Avoid mass-submission tools and directories that exist only to sell links.

8. Participate genuinely in online communities

Effort: Low to Medium | Impact: Low to Medium

Forums, subreddits, Quora, and niche communities can send traffic and occasionally links. But only if you participate genuinely, not self-promotionally.

How to do it well:

1. Find the 2 or 3 communities where your target audience spends time
2. Spend a week just reading and understanding the culture before posting anything
3. Contribute genuinely helpful answers in your area of expertise
4. Only share your own content when it directly answers a specific question, and always disclose that it is your site
5. Build a reputation first. The links follow naturally.

Reddit and Quora links are mostly nofollow and do not pass PageRank directly. But they drive real traffic and often lead to dofollow links from people who discover your content there.

9. Build relationships with other site owners in your niche

Effort: High | Impact: High over time

Networking with non-competing site owners in your niche leads to natural link opportunities: collaborative posts, roundups, mentions in each other’s content.

How to do it:

1. Follow and engage with other content creators in your niche on social media. Real engagement, not just likes
2. Leave thoughtful comments on their blog posts
3. Share their content with your audience
4. After building a genuine relationship, explore collaboration: joint guides, expert roundups, podcast appearances, co-authored content

This is slow but produces the most natural, high-quality links of any method here.

10. Reclaim links from competitors’ dead pages

Effort: Medium | Impact: Medium to High

Find pages on competing websites that used to have content but now return 404 errors. Other sites that linked to those dead pages now have broken links you can step in to replace.

How to do it:

1. Use Ahrefs’ free backlink checker or Moz’s Link Explorer to look at a competitor’s backlink profile
2. Look for links pointing to URLs that return 404 errors
3. If you have content covering the same topic, identify who links to the broken page
4. Reach out to those linking sites the same way you would for broken link building (method 1 above)

11. Turn your credentials into links

Effort: Low | Impact: Medium

Professional credentials, memberships, and affiliations often come with free listing opportunities that include a link. These are low-effort because you qualify by default.

• Professional association member directories. Many include a link to member websites
• Alumni directories. Many universities list alumni businesses with links
• Award submissions. Industry awards often link to nominees and winners
• Speaking gigs. Conferences and webinars typically link to their speakers
• Podcast appearances. Most podcast show notes include a link to the guest’s site

How to track your backlinks as a new site

Google Search Console under Links shows which sites link to you for free. For more detail, the free tiers of Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush each show a limited number of backlinks per site, which is enough to track progress in the early months.

Check your backlink profile once a month and track three things:

• Total referring domains (unique sites linking to you)
• The authority scores of those domains
• Which pages on your site are receiving links

For more on why backlinks matter and what makes one good or bad, read what are backlinks and why do they matter.

Frequently asked questions