Getting Your First 50 Backlinks as an Indie Hacker

"Get backlinks" is too vague to act on. Split the target into buckets you can knock out one at a time. A realistic mix for a new SaaS: 15 foundational profile links, 12 directory listings, 10 community and content links, 8 earned editorial links, and 5 partner or integration links. Track progress against those numbers and the goal stops feeling abstract.

Start with the links nobody has to approve. In one afternoon you can claim your X/Twitter bio, LinkedIn company page, GitHub org plus repo README, Crunchbase entry, dev.to and Hashnode profiles, an Indie Hackers product page, a Product Hunt maker profile, Gravatar, and your own About page linking the product. That is roughly 15 links done before you pitch a single human. Most are nofollow, but they confirm your brand to search engines and seed the crawl that finds everything else.

A dofollow link passes ranking signal (the thing people mean by "link juice"). A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", which tells Google not to pass that signal; since 2019 Google treats it as a hint rather than a hard rule, and there are rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored" variants for user content and paid links. Here is the part most guides skip: Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit, and GitHub links are almost all nofollow. They still matter a lot, because they drive referral traffic and brand searches, and they get you discovered by people who then cite you with dofollow links from their own sites. A natural profile is mostly nofollow. A profile that is 100% dofollow looks purchased.

Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) are third-party 0 to 100 scores, logarithmic, and not Google metrics. Use them to compare two options, do not worship them. One dofollow link from a DR40 blog that is actually about your niche beats twenty DR60 links from generic listing sites. Relevance and real traffic outrank the raw number every time.

There are two kinds of directory. Auto-approve link dumps that publish anything for a fee leave footprints and get ignored or discounted by Google. Curated directories, where a human reviews submissions, are worth your time. Realistic targets: Product Hunt (nofollow but huge referral), BetaList, SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, G2 or Capterra if you sell B2B, the relevant "awesome-X" GitHub lists, and niche curated lists like codenation.dev. Ten to twelve solid directories is a healthy chunk of your 50.

Being honest about a directory like codenation.dev: it is a curated SaaS and dev directory on an aged domain (currently around DR16). One listing there will not rank you on its own, and you should mentally apply that rule to every directory. Its real value is threefold. You get a topically relevant link in the exact developer/SaaS bucket your product lives in (relevance is the whole point). You get referral traffic from founders who actually browse these lists looking for tools. And you add variety to a clean link profile instead of a suspicious spike of identical links. Skip any directory that lists casinos next to CRMs, sells "guaranteed dofollow" with no editorial review, or shows zero traffic in a tool like Similarweb.

The durable links are the ones people choose to give you, and they only happen if you publish something linkable. Three reliable formats: a free tool, calculator, or template tied to your niche (people link tools far more than landing pages); an original data study where you survey your users and publish real numbers (writers and bloggers cite statistics); and a genuinely useful comparison or alternatives post that someone would reference in an argument.

Use journalist-request services to land links on real publications. HARO has been folded into Connectively, so most indies now work Featured.com, Help a B2B Writer, Qwoted, and SourceBottle. Answer two or three relevant queries a day with a specific, quotable response and expect a handful of placements a month, usually dofollow on actual media sites. Pair that with targeted guest posts: pitch a niche blog a specific angle, not a generic "write for us" farm, and ask for an in-content or author-bio link where it fits naturally.

Your tech stack is a backlink source. Integration and marketplace pages are some of the easiest dofollow links to earn: get listed in the Vercel, Supabase, Stripe Apps, Zapier, or Chrome Web Store directories, and build a "works with Stripe/Slack" page that partners link back to. Co-marketing with a complementary (not competing) tool gets you a relevant link and a shared audience.

Podcasts and interviews in your niche almost always include a dofollow link in the show notes, so pitch small and mid-size founder shows where the bar is low. And spend real time in communities like Indie Hackers, relevant subreddits, and niche Discord or Slack groups. The links there are mostly nofollow and you should never drop a raw URL, but the brand searches and referral traffic you build are what later earn the dofollow editorial links downstream.

Keep a simple sheet: URL, anchor text, dofollow or nofollow, date, DR, and referral clicks. Verify links stay live using free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or the Links report in Google Search Console. Vary your anchors so the profile looks natural: mix your brand name, the naked URL, and generic phrases like "this tool" instead of stuffing exact-match keywords.

Pace matters for a young domain. Five to ten new links a month reads as organic growth; 50 appearing in launch week reads as bought. Stay away from Fiverr "1000 backlinks" gigs, private blog networks, blog-comment spam, and paid bulk directory blasts, all of which leave footprints you may have to clean up with a disavow file later. Re-check the profile quarterly and disavow anything obviously toxic in Search Console. Fifty real, relevant links earned this way will outperform a thousand junk ones, and they will not blow up on you in the next algorithm update.