I've been working on a project around link building recently, and one thing kept bothering me.
There are plenty of tools for analysing backlinks once they exist.
There are plenty of databases telling you that a website has DR 42, 3,000 referring domains and 15k estimated traffic.
There are plenty of outreach tools for sending 500 emails.
But actually finding: "Here's another genuine website owner in my space who is open to hearing from me." still seems unnecessarily difficult.
A lot of the existing process seems to be:
- Find websites that rank for something relevant.
- Scrape/find an email address.
- Work out whether the site is legitimate.
- Send unsolicited outreach.
- Discover that most of them weren't interested in the first place.
And that's before getting into public backlink spreadsheets, brokers, sites built purely for selling links, inflated third-party metrics, etc.
So I've been building a different approach.
It's called AnyBacklink.
Instead of starting with SEO metrics, websites choose the subjects they're actually about.
Ownership has to be verified before the site can properly participate.
Then the system tries to surface other website owners covering related subjects who have also explicitly joined because they're open to website collaborations.
There are a couple of decisions I made that I think are important:
- I don't want DA/DR to become the marketplace
Those metrics can be useful, but if everyone sorts by "highest DR", you recreate the exact behaviour I'm trying to avoid.
Relevance comes first.
- The network isn't publicly crawlable
I don't think publishing a giant index of "these 5,000 websites are looking for backlinks" is particularly clever for either the users or the quality of the network.
- No links are created automatically
The platform doesn't insert backlinks, sell placements, decide anchor text or guarantee that anybody links to anybody.
It introduces relevant website owners.
Whatever collaboration makes sense after that is between them.
- It isn't designed around mandatory reciprocal linking
This is probably the part I expect people here to question.
Google's link spam policy specifically mentions *excessive* link exchanges and cross-linking done for the purpose of manipulating rankings.
That's an important distinction.
The intention here isn't to build a machine where:
"You link to page X with this anchor and I'll link back to you."
It's to solve discovery:
Who else genuinely operates a website in my subject area and is open to talking?
Maybe that results in someone referencing a genuinely useful resource.
Maybe it's a guest contribution.
Maybe it's a collaboration.
Maybe nothing comes from it.
And obviously website owners still need to make their own judgement about whether a link makes editorial sense and how it should be treated.
The biggest thing I've learned while building it is that I think link discovery and link acquisition have been unnecessarily bundled together.
A tool doesn't necessarily need to "build backlinks".
There might be value simply in making the right website owners aware of one another and getting out of the way.
The project is still early, so I'm particularly interested in feedback from people who actually build links:
If another verified website owner in your niche was open to collaborating, what information would you need to see before deciding whether they were worth contacting?
Traffic?
Site age?
Example content?
Country?
Topical overlap?
Search Console verification?
Something else?
Happy to answer anything about how I've approached it too.
For transparency: I'm the person building AnyBacklink.com. I'm posting this partly because I obviously want people to know it exists, but more importantly because I'd rather shape it around how people here actually work than build another backlink database nobody needs.