How to get backlinks when you hate outreach
You know links matter. You also know that emailing strangers to ask for one mostly does not work.
The outreach number, measured
A deliberate outreach campaign from this project sent fifty emails and produced two links. That is a 4% conversion rate on hours of personalised work, and it is roughly what everyone gets and nobody publishes.
Be linkable rather than promotable
Nobody links to a landing page. People link to a thing that is useful without an account, that they can point a friend at, and that will still work next year. Free tools, original data and reference pages accumulate links passively because linking to them is genuinely helpful to the linker's own reader.
Entity registration is not link building but it looks like it
Directories, profiles and category listings pass little authority individually. Their value is establishing that you exist as a named thing. Do them once, in a weekend, and stop.
The only reliable mechanism is being useful in public
People link to things that save them work. Not to your opinion, not to your announcement, and almost never to your blog post. A tool that does one job well, a dataset nobody else published, a number nobody else measured: these get linked because linking is cheaper than rebuilding. Everything else is asking a stranger for a favour.
What actually got linked here
The free tools, by a wide margin, and the specific numbers. Across 122 linking sites and roughly ~1,300 backlinks, the pattern was consistent: the pages that gave something away were cited, and the pages that argued for the product were not. That is the whole reason this site's tools require no account, and it is why these guides put the pitch last.
Measured, not asserted
122 linking sites and ~1,300 backlinks, which is roughly ten links per site: a directory network repeating itself rather than 122 independent decisions. Only 61% of those sites pass link equity at all.
Free tool for this: Internal Link Graph. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 24 and Chapter 28 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.