Link Building
A curated directory of sites that accept links.
Browse a hand-picked directory of high-authority sites for guest posts, article submissions, directories and forums: filter by domain authority and category, follow the step-by-step submission guide for each, and track every submission from planned to live.
What you get
Everything Link Building delivers, out of the box.
Filter by DA & category
Per-site submission guides
Article / directory / forum sites
Track your submissions
Further down the screen
The rest of what Link Building puts in front of you, from the same session.
How it works
From input to insight in three steps.
Enter your URL or keyword
Point Link Building at any page, domain or search term, yours or a competitor's.
SEO Roger analyzes it
We run the analysis with DataForSEO's live SEO index in seconds.
Get a prioritized report
Read a clear, ranked breakdown of exactly what to do next.
Related tools
More from Competitive Research.
What is Link Building?
The Link Building directory is a hand-picked list of sites that genuinely accept submissions: guest post targets, article directories, business directories, resource pages and forums. Each entry carries its category, authority band and a step-by-step submission guide, and you can track every submission from planned through submitted to live. It is free on every plan.
How to use Link Building
From signup to shipped fix, this is the whole loop.
- 1Create a free accountSign up in under a minute. No credit card is required, and your first site scan works without an account at all.
- 2Point Link Building at your siteEnter the URL or domain you want to analyze. You can run it on your own site or on a competitor's.
- 3Let it pull the live dataLink Building fetches the current state of the page or domain and runs its checks. Most runs finish in seconds.
- 4Read the ranked findingsResults come back ordered by impact rather than by count, so the issue costing you the most traffic is at the top, not buried under cosmetic warnings.
- 5Ship the fix, then re-runApply the recommended change, or let Roger AI draft it for you, then run the tool again to confirm the issue is resolved and track the improvement.
Why Link Building matters
Links remain one of the strongest ranking signals, and they are the hardest thing in SEO to acquire because they depend on other people. The failure mode for most teams is not lack of effort, it is scattered effort: a spreadsheet that goes stale, no record of what was submitted where, and no way to tell which placements went live. A directory with tracking attached fixes the process problem, which is usually the real bottleneck.
Search is no longer only Google. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude answer a growing share of queries by reading the same pages crawlers do, then citing a handful of sources. SEO Roger keeps both audiences in view: the classic SERP and the AI answer, from one workspace.
Who it's for
- In-house SEOs who need competitive and backlink intelligence without stitching three tools together
- Agencies and consultants producing client-ready findings, fast
- Founders and marketers who want the fix, not just the metric
Link Building in depth
What kind of links these are, honestly
These are the foundational, self-service end of link building: directories, submission-based listings, guest post opportunities and resource pages. They are legitimate and worth having, particularly for a new site with almost no profile, and they are not the same as earning editorial coverage. Nobody builds a dominant link profile out of directory submissions alone. Treat this as the floor you establish quickly so that your genuinely earned links have something to sit on.
Relevance beats authority at this end of the market
A niche directory in your industry with modest authority is worth more than a general directory with an impressive score and no topical connection to what you do. Search engines have spent two decades learning to discount context-free links, and a listing surrounded by unrelated businesses carries very little. Filter by category first and authority second, which is the opposite of how most people use a directory like this.
Why tracking submissions matters more than it sounds
Submission-based link building has a long and unpredictable lag. You submit, and something appears somewhere between a week and never. Without a record you resubmit to places that already listed you, chase places that rejected you, and have no idea what your actual conversion rate is. Moving each entry through planned, submitted and live gives you the one number that tells you whether this channel is worth more of your time.
Where to stop
There is a point of diminishing returns, and it arrives earlier than most people expect. Once you have covered the relevant directories in your category, additional low-quality submissions add nothing and, in volume, start to look like a pattern search engines discount. When the relevant list is exhausted, move your effort to the Backlink Gap tool and earn links from places your competitors already have.
Link Building questions, answered
Does the directory cost credits?
No. It is free on every plan, including free-forever, because it is our own curated data rather than a paid third-party feed.
Are directory links still worth building in the current era?
Relevant ones, yes, in moderation. Industry and local directories still pass value and still get used by real people looking for suppliers. Generic link farms that list any business for a fee do not, and at volume they can hurt. The distinction is whether a human would ever plausibly use the directory to find a business.
Will submitting to everything here improve my rankings?
Not reliably, and the attempt can backfire. A sudden burst of low-relevance directory links is a recognizable pattern. A steady handful of genuinely relevant listings is the safer and more effective approach. Prioritize the entries that match your category and location, and skip the rest.
How long until a submission goes live?
It varies enormously and is outside our control, from a couple of days for automated directories to several weeks for editorially reviewed ones, and some never publish at all. That unpredictability is exactly why the tracker exists: it holds the record so you do not have to remember what you sent where.
Do you submit on my behalf?
No. The tool gives you the target, the requirements and a step-by-step guide, and records what you did. The submission itself is yours to make, because most of these sites require a real account and a genuine description of your business.
What should I do once I have worked through the list?
Move to earned links. Run Backlink Gap to find the domains already linking to your competitors, which is where the more valuable editorial links live. The directory establishes a baseline profile, and the gap analysis is how you grow past it.
Ready to try Link Building?
Create a free account and run it in minutes, plus 55+ other SEO and AI-visibility tools in the same workspace.