Link Building 1.0: Free blog directories, social media, and forums

6 min readJan 22, 2021

As a follow up to my post about backlinks and their importance, let’s see one relatively easy way to get backlinks to your blog. This is the submission of your blog to free blog directories. This way, your blog will gain more exposure and a boost in referral traffic. More importantly, it is a great way to acquire more backlinks if you create good content. Harsh Agrawal of shoutmeloud.com heavily inspires this list. Most of the credit goes to Harsh, so make sure to have a look at his website.

Right now, I am in the process of submitting my blog to many web and blog directories and similar services or content creation services.

Social media backlinks

Let’s see a few of the social media I have used first. Keep in mind that most links you get from social media and content creation platforms are nofollow backlinks. However, as we head down the list, you will find several options that provide dofollow links. Now keep in mind that these links will mainly help your blog get indexed faster by search engines. Don’t expect significant improvements to your blog’s Domain Rating and Domain Authority, but they are a good means to kickstart your link building.

Medium: You can create a free account on medium.com and import your blog posts by clicking your profile picture, selecting “Stories,” and then providing the URL to your post. You can also edit your story before posting it.
Slideshare: I have uploaded my slides from my conference paper in PLDI’20 to Slideshare and added backlinks to Borderpolar.
YouTube: You can add a link to your website in your channel description, and you can add links to your video descriptions. Make sure to do it in the first 25–50 characters so that it will be easily visible.
Instagram: You can add your website’s link in the website section of your bio.
Facebook: You can create a Facebook page for your website/blog. You can then add your website URL to the website section of the page’s information. You can also share content from your website, and you can also add your blog to your personal profile’s website section.
LinkedIn: Your profile’s contact info tab allows you to add up to three links. These links will be shown at the top of your LinkedIn profile for non-logged-in users. You can also create a LinkedIn company page and add your website URL as part of the basic business information.
Pinterest: Add your website link to your Pinterest profile and claim it so that you can use rich pins. Rich Pins allow you to post photos and images to Pinterest as if you would be doing it with an article on Facebook. Then you can also attach a link to your pins that directs back to your website.
Quora: You can add a link to your website URL in your profile. You can also add URLs to your answers; just make sure that the content is relevant, and your answers are of high quality rather than the spammy type.
Reddit: You can add a backlink to your website in your Reddit profile. You can also share posts in your personal user subreddit, u/username. It also turns out that links Reddit comments are dofollow.
500px: 500px is a website for photographers to share their work. Add a link to your website/blog in your 500px profile. This is also a dofollow backlink.
SBNation: You can create a profile at sbnation.com. You can add your blog to your profile, your signature, and your “About me.” Links from sbanation.com are dofollow.
telegra.ph: You can publish articles on telegra.ph, and any links you add to them will be dofollow.
bloglovin.com: You can add your blog to bloglovin.com and claim it. You can also post articles with dofollow links.
strikingly.com: You can create a dummy blog at strikingly.com and add links to your blog to it. These are also dofollow backlinks.
coub.com: You can create a profile on coub.com and add dofollow links to your blog in the “Homepage” and about sections of your profile.
itsmyurls.com: You can create a profile on itsmyurls.com and add links to your blog. They will be dofollow links.
cplusplus.com: You can create a profile at cplusplus.com and add your blog to the website section. Again this is a dofollow link.
folkd.com: You can create a profile at folkd.com and add dofollow links to your blog.
delphiforums.com: You can create a profile at delphiforums.com and add dofollow links to your blog.
coolors.co: Once again you can create a profile at coolors.co and add links to your blog and they will be dofollow.
triberr.com: You can create a profile at triber.com and add your website to the website section of the profile. Again this looks like a dofollow link. You can also add your blog’s RSS feed to it and publish all your posts on Triberr.
doodleordie.com: Another chance for a dofollow link by creating a profile at doodlordie.com and linking to your website/blog in the website section.

Verified Blog Directories to submit your blog

To get started, create a template in Google Docs or a text editor with the following information as it will speed up the process of submitting your blog to blog directories:

Name of the blog:
URL of the blog:
Feed URL of the blog
Description of the blog in 2–3 lines

List of free blog directories to submit your blog

The blog directories below do not have any requirements to accept your blog. You can submit it and wait for a response in a few weeks/months, or pay a fee to speed up the process — don’t do that.

Let’s see Harsh’s list:

List of blog directories requiring a reciprocal link or a badge

Harsh is not a fan of these blog directories, and I am not either, but anyway, you may want to go for it.

List of forums with dofollow links

Dofollow blogs and forums use the do not enable the nofollow attribute, so search engines will follow the backlinks they provide. This helps you boost your backlinks and increase your blog’s backlink profile. Link juice from a high DA blog or forum is great for your blog as it will boost your Google SERP rankings. Especially if you are active in a niche forum that allows dofollow backlinks, you will not only get a quality link to your site, but you will also be getting referral traffic. This list is also compiled by Harsh Agrawal, although I had already found some of these on my own.

Now, the process of being active on a forum is a time-consuming one, so focus only on a couple of these that are related to your niche to maximize your gain.

Below you will find tools that submit your website/blog to many search engines and web directories. These are mostly low-quality backlinks, but the referring domains are very few, so the search shouldn’t complain about you doing anything fishy.

IMTalk website submitter (1,800+ backlinks)

IMT’s online website submitter will submit or create pages for your blog in a lot of places. You will not get high-quality backlinks from this procedure, but let’s be honest, everyone does it. This will lead to faster indexing and an improved backlink profile for your blog.

SumbitX website submitter

SubmitX also submits your website to search engines and web directories, claiming to do so for 776 search engines and web directories. This is also a free tool.

Small SEO Tools backlink maker

The backlink maker by Small SEO tools is similar to the above tools. It will create backlinks to around 100 search engines and web directories. Keep in mind that some of these are overlapping.

Finally, make sure to disavow and remove any toxic backlinks using an SEO tool like SEMRush and Ahrefs. The free versions can do that, so you won’t have to pay anything. Also, don’t expect a miracle here. I got around 25,000 backlinks using these tools, but most of them are from the same domains. So in total, I received only two handfuls of new referrals, nothing impressive.

Originally published at https://borderpolar.com on January 22, 2021.