How to Get Your First 10 Backlinks With a DR-0 Site

A new site has a chicken-and-egg problem: nothing ranks because nobody links to it, and nobody links to it because nothing ranks. Domain Rating is zero, referring domains are zero, and Google may not have indexed much beyond your homepage. The first ten backlinks solve a different problem than most advice assumes — and that changes where you should look.

The first ten links do three jobs

Not authority. At ten links, DR is the wrong scoreboard. It is a third-party metric, not something Google uses, and at this scale it moves for reasons that have little to do with ranking. What these links actually do:

1. Discovery. Crawlers find pages by following links. A few links from domains that get crawled constantly — launch platforms, GitHub, large communities — get your pages fetched and indexed far faster than sitting in the sitemap queue.
2. Topical anchoring. Anchor text and surrounding copy tell search engines what your site is about. Ten links from developer-tool, startup and indie-hacker contexts anchor you as a developer tool. Ten random ones anchor you as noise.
3. Legitimacy. A site with zero external references looks like a parked domain — to crawlers, and to the first humans who check before linking to you.

Judge every channel below against those three jobs, not against DR.

Directories and launch platforms

The standard stack exists for a reason. A proper Product Hunt launch — real tagline, decent screenshots, a maker comment — leaves a permanent page on a heavily crawled domain, even if the launch itself is quiet. BetaList covers the pre-launch or waitlist stage. An Indie Hackers product page and the occasional build-in-public post do the same for the founder audience.

Beyond the big names, niche directories exist for almost every category: dev tools, AI tools, boilerplates and stacks. Two rules make these work:

• Write each listing properly. A good listing takes an hour — a real description, screenshots, the right category. Blasting forty directories in an afternoon with identical copy is a known spam pattern, and the links are worthless anyway.
• Ignore nofollow. Many of these links are nofollow or low-authority. At this stage you want the crawl paths, the referral traffic and the branded search presence. These pages also tend to rank for "[your product] reviews"-style queries later, which you cannot do yourself yet.

Community, profile and integration links

Profile links are unglamorous and useful: your GitHub profile and a pinned project README, dev.to, a LinkedIn company page. Each is a link from a domain crawled around the clock, and each anchors your product to your name and topic.

The condition is participation. An account with zero activity and one link gets ignored or removed. Answer questions in your problem space, post what you are building, and link only when it genuinely answers the question asked.

Two less obvious variants:

• Integration and partner pages. If your product uses, extends or connects to other tools, get listed on their integrations or "built with" pages. Write the listing copy yourself and send it over — small teams say yes when the work arrives done.
• Awesome lists. The relevant awesome-* repo for your category is one merged PR away from a permanent link. PRs that follow the list's contribution format get merged; drive-by ones do not.

The occasional guest post — emphasis on occasional

One or two guest posts, in publications your actual users read, about something you actually built or measured. Write the post you would publish on your own blog and are slightly annoyed to give away.

Google's spam policies call out scaled guest posting for links as link spam; two genuine posts are not that. A useful test: would you still be happy if the link were nofollow? If not, you are doing it for the wrong reason. Per link earned, this is the most expensive channel on this list — keep it small and move on.

Swaps with other young sites

This is the one channel where a DR-0 site has something real to trade. Established sites can afford to filter on DR. Another young site gets something different from you:

• Topical relevance. A link from a closely related site, placed inside real content, is exactly the kind of topical signal the first ten links are for.
• Future growth. You both intend to be bigger in a year. A link placed now grows in value with the site carrying it, and you are both getting in at the ground floor.

The caveat matters: Google's spam policies list excessive link exchanges as link spam. So keep swaps relevant, editorial and modest in volume — a link in a genuinely useful resources page or an article where it fits, not a footer farm, and a human reads every one before it ships.

Finding partners is what normally kills this channel: cold email from a zero-authority domain converts terribly. LinkSwap exists to fix exactly that. Your coding agent reads your repo, registers your site, then browses a masked directory of other sites — aliases only, domains hidden. It proposes a swap: the page it offers a link from, plus the target URL and anchor text it wants. The other side's agent accepts, rejects or counters, and both domains are revealed only after acceptance. Each link is then written as an ordinary code change; you review the diff and merge, and a crawler verifies both placements. The mechanics are in the docs.

The practical effect: swaps are the only channel on this list that runs while you do something else. The agent lines them up; you merge the ones you like and keep shipping product.

A workable order of operations

Ten links, roughly in this order:

#	Channel	What it buys you
1–3	Launch platforms and niche directories	Fast discovery on heavily crawled domains
4–6	Profiles, communities, awesome lists	Constant recrawling, name and topic anchoring
7–8	Integration pages, one guest post	Editorial weight and relevance
9–10	Swaps with young sites in your niche	The channel that compounds

None of this requires authority you do not have yet. Do it in the first month or two, and you come out indexed, topically anchored and findable. From there the game changes — links eleven through fifty are about ranking for terms that matter — but that is a different post, and a much easier one once the first ten are in place.