Table of Contents
Here’s an interesting idea I noticed for getting many more SEO backlinks.
A friend of mine from an indie hacking community recently shared a fascinating SEO success story.
Well, kind of. He founded a small SaaS years ago, and recently sold it. He’s now become more active in SEO and he checked the SaaS product’s backlinks out of curiosity.
To his surprise (and mine), it now boasts an incredible 1.6 million backlinks, and 750 linking websites!
A shame he’s sold it, but it’s interesting to note.
What’s the secret?
How did the site build such a massive trove of backlinks? The answer is user-generated content (UGC).
The SaaS is a landing page generator, which means every user creates multiple pages. Those pages are public-facing, and the users actively market them.
If others then link to those pages, each one is contributing to the SaaS site’s backlink profile. Now we have to note, not all those backlinks will be do-follow, but at that volume I think it’s a clear enough signal for Google.
It’s a bit like programmatic SEO done for you — every new landing page not only helps the user but potentially also creates new backlinks for the main domain.
So this got me thinking
If used as a strategy, this could allow you to organically build a huge amount of backlinks without the usual grind.
If you’re already running a platform that allows for UGC, this might be the easiest SEO hack you can use to boost your backlinks naturally. Just encourage or enable more content creation, and for users to share it.
If you’re not running a UGC platform, it’s something you could consider. For example, if you’re running a marketplace or directory, allowing users to create pages could work.
Or, you could build a UGC site or small SaaS, with the sole purpose of growing the backlinks and domain authority of that site — so you could use it as a free, solid backlink on your other projects.
Note: originally published on my Tiny SEO Lessons blog
Written by