Title: I built a free link exchange tool that matches sites by keyword, not category
Link building is the part of SEO that never gets easier. You can pay for links, which is against Google's guidelines and expensive, or you can trade them with other site owners, which is free and works fine when the sites are actually related.
The problem is that trading them manually is slow. Forum threads, cold emails, Skype, and most of what comes back has nothing to do with your niche. I've been doing it for months across a few of my own sites and two things kept wasting my time.
First, relevance. A backlink from a site covering your topic, placed where a reader would click it, is worth something. Twenty links from unrelated sites are worth close to nothing and start to look like a pattern. Most of what gets offered in a link thread is the second kind.
Second, and this one actually costs money: more than once I agreed a swap, wrote the content, published my link, and then found out the person I'd been talking to didn't have access to the site they were offering. No admin login, no way to add anything. My link was live, theirs never appeared.
So I built AnyBacklink to fix those two specific things.
Matching is on keywords, not broad categories. Most link directories put you in a bucket like "Health" or "Technology" and leave you to sift through a thousand sites that have nothing to do with yours. A supplements shop and a hospital software vendor are both "health" and neither should be linking to the other. Google rewards links between sites that are closely aligned on subject, not loosely grouped by industry. So you tag your site with three keywords and see verified sites sharing them, ranked by how much you overlap. Plurals count as the same word, so watch and watches don't cost you two slots. You can also set keywords you never want to be matched against, per site, so a niche you keep away from one domain can still be welcome on another.
Nothing is ranked by Domain Authority. DA is a third-party score, not something Google uses, and chasing it is how people end up with a pile of links from high-DA sites that have nothing to do with their subject. Ranking by relevance instead means the tool cannot push you into a swap that hurts you.
Every site is verified before anyone can see it. You upload a text file to your root, same idea as Search Console. If you can't put a file on the domain, you can't list it. That means everyone you talk to can actually place a link.
Both halves of a deal are stated before anyone commits. Every proposal says what you're giving and what you want back, including placement type and link attribute. The other owner can accept, decline, or send back different terms. No more agreeing a swap and finding out afterwards you gave a dofollow in-content link and got a footer nofollow.
Links are checked, not just claimed. When you publish, you submit the page and the platform fetches it and confirms the link is really there before the swap counts. Once one side has published, the other has seven days. Completed swaps raise your position in other members' results, so people who follow through get found first.
It's also a private network. Listings sit behind a login and are never indexed, so your site is not added to a public directory of websites looking for backlinks. Nobody outside can see who is listed, what they are tagged with, or who swapped with whom.
What it doesn't do: sell links, place links, broker anything, or take commission. There's nothing to buy. What you agree is between you and the other owner.
It's at anybacklink.com. Free, no card, and it takes about two minutes to list a site.
Happy to answer anything, including the obvious objection about reciprocal links and Google's guidelines. Short version: excessive reciprocal linking is a scheme, a handful of relevant exchanges is not, and the whole tool is built around keeping you on the right side of that line.
Link building is the part of SEO that never gets easier. You can pay for links, which is against Google's guidelines and expensive, or you can trade them with other site owners, which is free and works fine when the sites are actually related.
The problem is that trading them manually is slow. Forum threads, cold emails, Skype, and most of what comes back has nothing to do with your niche. I've been doing it for months across a few of my own sites and two things kept wasting my time.
First, relevance. A backlink from a site covering your topic, placed where a reader would click it, is worth something. Twenty links from unrelated sites are worth close to nothing and start to look like a pattern. Most of what gets offered in a link thread is the second kind.
Second, and this one actually costs money: more than once I agreed a swap, wrote the content, published my link, and then found out the person I'd been talking to didn't have access to the site they were offering. No admin login, no way to add anything. My link was live, theirs never appeared.
So I built AnyBacklink to fix those two specific things.
Matching is on keywords, not broad categories. Most link directories put you in a bucket like "Health" or "Technology" and leave you to sift through a thousand sites that have nothing to do with yours. A supplements shop and a hospital software vendor are both "health" and neither should be linking to the other. Google rewards links between sites that are closely aligned on subject, not loosely grouped by industry. So you tag your site with three keywords and see verified sites sharing them, ranked by how much you overlap. Plurals count as the same word, so watch and watches don't cost you two slots. You can also set keywords you never want to be matched against, per site, so a niche you keep away from one domain can still be welcome on another.
Nothing is ranked by Domain Authority. DA is a third-party score, not something Google uses, and chasing it is how people end up with a pile of links from high-DA sites that have nothing to do with their subject. Ranking by relevance instead means the tool cannot push you into a swap that hurts you.
Every site is verified before anyone can see it. You upload a text file to your root, same idea as Search Console. If you can't put a file on the domain, you can't list it. That means everyone you talk to can actually place a link.
Both halves of a deal are stated before anyone commits. Every proposal says what you're giving and what you want back, including placement type and link attribute. The other owner can accept, decline, or send back different terms. No more agreeing a swap and finding out afterwards you gave a dofollow in-content link and got a footer nofollow.
Links are checked, not just claimed. When you publish, you submit the page and the platform fetches it and confirms the link is really there before the swap counts. Once one side has published, the other has seven days. Completed swaps raise your position in other members' results, so people who follow through get found first.
It's also a private network. Listings sit behind a login and are never indexed, so your site is not added to a public directory of websites looking for backlinks. Nobody outside can see who is listed, what they are tagged with, or who swapped with whom.
What it doesn't do: sell links, place links, broker anything, or take commission. There's nothing to buy. What you agree is between you and the other owner.
It's at anybacklink.com. Free, no card, and it takes about two minutes to list a site.
Happy to answer anything, including the obvious objection about reciprocal links and Google's guidelines. Short version: excessive reciprocal linking is a scheme, a handful of relevant exchanges is not, and the whole tool is built around keeping you on the right side of that line.
