Reddit and Forum Backlinks: The Strategy Most Founders Skip

Most link-building advice is about email. Pitch a journalist. Pitch a guest post. Pitch a podcast. Fine, but it skips the channel sitting upstream of all of them: the place where journalists and bloggers find the ideas they then cite. And most founders ignore it because they're too busy emailing.

That channel is Reddit, plus about twenty other forums and communities that together produce more SaaS referral traffic than Twitter did at its peak.

Why founders skip it

Three objections come up every time I bring this up.

"Reddit links are nofollow, so they don't count." Half true, wrong frame.

"I'll get banned for self-promoting." True if you self-promote. Easy to avoid.

"It doesn't scale." Used to be true. Isn't anymore.

Let me address each.

"Nofollow" is the wrong frame

Yes, Reddit's outbound links carry rel="nofollow ugc". Google has been saying since 2019 that nofollow is a "hint" now rather than a hard directive, and post-2023 nofollow links appear to pass limited signal. Set that aside. Even if they passed exactly zero link equity, Reddit would still be worth the time.

First, the traffic. A comment on a popular r/SaaS thread pulls 200 to 2,000 visitors in its first week. A chunk of those become trial signups, which is the actual point.

Second, citations downstream. Bloggers and newsletter writers and journalists scrape Reddit for examples and opinions. When one of them finds a useful comment you wrote, they cite the site you mentioned, and those citations are usually dofollow editorial links from DR 40+ domains. This is the part most people never notice.

Third, threads themselves rank. Since Google's 2024 community-content boost, Reddit threads sit on page one for a big chunk of "best X for Y" queries. Being the useful comment on one of those threads is a long-tail traffic source that compounds for years.

One thing people forget: Quora and IndieHackers links are dofollow, and those platforms behave like Reddit in every other way.

The non-spammy self-promotion playbook

People who get banned for promotion usually made one of four mistakes:

• Posting the same message across multiple threads
• Promoting in threads where the OP wasn't asking what you sell
• Never contributing outside of promo
• Using anchor text like "check out my tool"

The pattern that works across Reddit, IndieHackers, Dev.to, HackerNews, and niche forums is the same. Out of every ten comments, eight should be pure contribution. Answering, opining, disagreeing with someone. Two can mention your product, but only when the thread is actually about what you sell.

"Actually about what you sell" meaning:

• The OP asked for recommendations in your exact category
• The OP described a problem your product solves and the top answers haven't mentioned it
• Your comment is already useful by itself and you're adding the product as context at the end ("I also built a thing in this space, happy to answer questions")

If you can't meet one of those bars, skip the thread.

Finding the right threads

Finding them is the time-consuming part of the job, and it's also the part that most benefits from automation.

Manually:

• Set up Google Alerts for site:reddit.com <your category term> so you get an email the moment a relevant thread appears
• Build a list of 10-20 subreddits, forums, and community categories where your audience spends time
• Check each one once a day, skim new posts, jump in where you can add something

Realistic time cost is 30-60 minutes a day. Most founders do it inconsistently, which mostly means not at all.

With a tool (disclosure, this is what Backly does):

• AI scans 50+ platforms continuously and filters threads by relevance to your site
• It drafts a first-pass comment referencing the actual conversation in the thread
• You hand-edit and post yourself, by hand. Automated posting anywhere near Reddit is a banning offense.

Even with automation, the human edit is mandatory. AI-written comments are increasingly recognizable, and subreddits downvote them fast.

What to actually write

Comments that convert, both for upvotes and for clickthroughs, share a pattern.

First, acknowledge the OP's actual situation. "Great question!" doesn't count. Reference a specific detail they gave.

Second, give a useful answer even if the person never clicks your link. The 80/20 rule applies inside each comment too.

Third, if you mention your product, do it once, do it late, and frame it as context. Something like: "I built [tool] because I hit this same wall. Happy to answer questions, but the pattern above works with any tool."

Fourth, leave the link out unless someone asks. Mention the name and let curious readers search. Half the top subreddits auto-filter comments with URLs.

Comments that ignore step two get downvoted. Comments that ignore step four get auto-filtered by moderators.

Measuring it

The mistake people make is measuring Reddit outreach by immediate conversions. What actually matters:

Visits in the 48 hours after your comment. Check your UTM or referrer log.

New dofollow links appearing to your site from bloggers who found you via Reddit. Check Ahrefs monthly for new referring domains.

Searches for your product name in Google in the 30 days after a run of comments. This one is slow but it's the most load-bearing signal you have.

Direct link attribution will always understate this channel, because people who discover you on Reddit often come back via search a week later.

A 30-day starter plan

If you've never done community outreach and want to test whether it moves the needle, a 30-day plan:

Week one is pure reconnaissance. List ten communities. Lurk. Note the format, tone, and what gets upvoted.

Week two, contribute 20 pure-value comments across those communities. No product mentions. You're building reputation and karma.

Week three, start running the 80/20 split. Aim for 15 contribution comments and 3-4 product-mention comments, only on threads where the fit is clear.

Week four, measure. Referral traffic, attributed trial signups, any new referring domains in Ahrefs.

At the end of 30 days, you'll know if this channel works for your category. For most B2B SaaS and indie products, it does. For categories where your buyers don't hang out in public forums (enterprise sales, regulated industries), it mostly doesn't.

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Backly does the "find these threads" step across 50+ platforms, drafts the contribution, and flags the ones with the highest traffic or conversion potential. See how it works or check pricing. Starts at €9/month.