The tactics Reddit actually recommends for getting backlinks are less about tricks and more about giving people a reason to link. Across r/SEO and r/juststart, the same handful of approaches come up: build something genuinely worth citing, pitch journalists through digital PR, study who links to your competitors and ask for the same, and trade or earn links inside your niche. The other consistent message is that it is slow work, and there is no version that costs neither time nor money.
The tactics that come up most
In a thread asking how to get backlinks, the highest-voted replies point to competitor backlink analysis (find who links to rivals, then reach out with something better) and digital PR through services like HARO and Qwoted, where you respond to journalist requests. One commenter described building a data-led PR piece from public statistics that earned coverage. A separate thread on organic backlinks leans hard on the “linkable asset” idea: one user pulled and analyzed thousands of local business listings into an original report and said the outreach landed almost every time, including a link from a DR 88 site.
The r/juststart write-up on lessons from building 300+ backlinks in a year adds the unglamorous staples: relevant guest posts and link exchanges between sites in related niches. In a getting links without paying thread, the top comment makes the same point: ignore DA and DR, and swap links with genuinely related businesses, using a jewelry site and a wedding site as the example.
The honest caveat
Reddit is not romantic about any of this. A recurring sentiment is that link building is the hardest and most tedious part of SEO, and that “create link-worthy content and links will come” only works after that content already ranks. Several users frame it as a straight trade: pay someone to build links, or spend your own hours on outreach. For local businesses, the repeated advice is to do something newsworthy in your area and let the coverage follow.
If you want the structured version of these tactics, our guides on how to get backlinks and link building outreach go deeper. And once links start landing, it is worth monitoring that they stay live, since earned links drop and go nofollow more often than people expect.
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