What's a question you are tired of being asked about your product?
I will go first.
"Do you do backlinks?"
Every week. Sometimes every day. From prospects. From agencies. From people who read one SEO blog post from 2018.
Backlinks are not the problem. Backlinks are a solution to a problem that has changed.
We are building Ranklink. A network of 20,000+ website and blog owners. Not a marketplace. Not a "buy links here" page. A community of people who want their content cited and are willing to cite others.
We ask them one question: "What topics are you writing about this quarter?" Then we match them with other owners in the same space. They link to each other. No money changes hands. No "guest post for $200." Just humans helping humans get cited.
The backlink industry is stuck in 2018. People still ask about domain authority. Page rank. Quantity over quality. The data does not support it anymore.
So here is my question back to you.
Do you still chase backlinks? Or have you found something else that works better?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
rankfender.com
Replies
open issuue lists are underrated. Sometimes people genuinely want to contribute but there is no clear direction for what is needed.
Rankfender
@lara_bishop You are right. An open issue list is not just a task list. It is an invitation. It tells people "here is what we need help with, here is the scope, here is the expected effort." Without that, well‑intentioned people either guess wrong or do nothing.
Most projects hide their issues behind a backlog that only the core team can see. That is a mistake. The people who want to contribute cannot read your mind. They cannot see the priority. They cannot tell which task is a quick fix and which is a month‑long refactor.
A well‑maintained issue list is a form of documentation. It signals maturity. It signals that you have a process. It signals that you welcome help.
The underrated part is that it also forces you to clarify your own thinking. Writing an issue forces you to answer: what is the problem, why does it matter, what does done look like? That is valuable even if no one else ever reads it.
What is the best issue list you have seen? The one that made you think "I could actually help with this."
I do use Ahrefs and similar tools to track backlinks for my service's page rank. (And let's be honest, watching backlinks grow as you build out content for your service has its own kind of satisfaction. You can't really dismiss that, can you?) But these days I'm leaning more into organic keywords. A customer who comes looking for you directly is more meaningful than one you happen to cross paths with, right? What matters to me is the intent and direction behind why someone finds our service, not whether they got there by accident.
Rankfender
@new_user___1312026d6d7984203bb5e11 You are right. Watching backlinks grow is satisfying. It feels like progress. It is also a lagging indicator. By the time you see the link, the work is already done. The satisfaction is real. The signal is not always useful.
Organic keywords are different. They tell you what people are actually looking for. Not where they came from. What they wanted when they searched. That is intent. That is direction.
A customer who searches for "AI visibility platform" and finds you is different from a customer who clicks a link on some blog they were already reading. The first one has intent. The second one has curiosity. Intent converts better.
The accidental discovery is fine. It is just not a strategy. You cannot build a business on people stumbling across you. You need people who are looking for what you have.
The hard part is that intent is harder to track than backlinks. You cannot put a number on "they came looking for us." But you know it when you see it. The demo requests are higher quality. The sales cycle is shorter. The retention is better.
How do you track intent in your own analytics? Do you have a way to separate the accidental visitors from the ones who were looking for you?
"is this on Product Hunt?"
i get why people ask. but it always comes right after someone's spent 20 minutes genuinely engaged with what you're building, asking real questions, and then the last thing they say is essentially "but has it been validated by a leaderboard."
nothing against PH but it started feeling like the question was really "do i have permission to care about this yet."
to your actual question, stopped chasing backlinks a while ago.
the stuff that moved the needle was just being genuinely useful in communities where the right people already hang out. one good thread in the right subreddit or one honest answer in a slack group did more than any link building campaign. slower to start, compounds better.
Rankfender
@minnnnnnn That question stings because it is not about the product. It is about permission. The person is engaged. They see the value. They are about to act. Then they hesitate. They need a signal that it is safe to care.
The leaderboard is a shortcut. It is not validation. It is social proof. It tells them "other people already decided this is worth their time." That is useful. It is also a crutch.
The communities point is the real answer. A good thread in the right subreddit is harder to measure. It does not show up on a report. The impact is slower. It also compounds better. One person reads your comment. They tell a friend. That friend tells someone else. The trust is built on usefulness, not on a badge.
The hard part is that the badge is instant. The community work is slow. Most people choose the badge. The ones who choose the community work win in the long run.
What is the most unexpected community that ended up driving real results for you? Not the obvious one. The one you did not expect to work.
Databox
Stopped chasing them. The biggest unlock for us has been the MCP ecosystem - getting listed where developers and AI power users already look for integrations does more than any link-building campaign.
Don't want to deliberately pursue, but sometimes feel compelled to add, but try to add links related to your own site, rather than adding some irrelevant backlinks.
For us the version of this is: is it just another AI image generator? The useful answer is workflow, not model output. A campaign asset only matters if it keeps the brief, brand context, channel size, variants, and publishing use case together. Otherwise the first image looks exciting and the tenth asset becomes manual work again.
Mine is "so I just set up a profile and receive alerts?"
The honest answer is: yes, kind of, but that's the floor. Nibble (food and drug recall alerts across 13 countries) does the passive layer well. Set country, set conditions, get notified when something matches.
The part the question skips is the active side. Scanning everyday products in your pantry or at the store before you buy them, so you catch something before you ever own it. Reading the Insights blog to see why a recall propagates across borders or which agency moved first. Checking a brand's recall history before you make it a regular purchase. The passive alert is the safety net. The active scan is what moves you from reactive to proactive.
The reason the question keeps coming is fair. From the outside, "recall app" sounds passive by definition. Most consumer safety tools are alerts-only. But framing it as "alerts" leaves out the half that's actually empowering, which is checking before something becomes a problem instead of being notified after it already is.
On your network design: the mutual-link approach you described sounds closer to academic citation networks than SEO link building. Citations work because the social cost of not reciprocating gets borne by the freeloader, not the host. Has the design held up against the obvious gaming patterns yet, or is it still pre-scale enough that nobody's tried?
"Is this like Apollo?"
Yes and no. Apollo is great for the US market. We specifically solve for India and emerging markets where global databases have 55-65% accuracy at best.
The real answer is: we're Apollo's cousin who grew up in Mumbai and actually knows where to find decision-makers here — including founders who don't exist on LinkedIn at all. But that's a hard one-liner to explain, so I just say "91% accuracy vs 60%" and move on.