Building SEO for a free Spanish math education site — what I've learned about backlinks so far

Hey IH 👋

I run la-calculadoraalicia.com — a free Spanish-language site with step-by-step math calculators built for primary school kids across Latin America and Spain. Parents and teachers use it to help kids actually understand how an answer is reached, not just get the number.

For the last while I've been heads-down on backlink building, and I wanted to share what's actually worked vs. what I expected to work — because I got a few things wrong early on.

What I assumed going in:
Get listed on as many directories and social profiles as possible, and rankings would follow.

What I've actually learned:
Most of that traffic-in-theory is dead weight. Directory listings and social profiles (LinkedIn, Medium, Tumblr,) are mostly nofollow or don't get indexed at all. They're fine as trust signals, but they don't move rankings.

The links that actually pass equity are the ones that are both dofollow and indexed — and so far, that's a much shorter list than I expected. WordPress.com articles have been my only confirmed win in that category.

Where I'm focusing now:
I ran a backlink-gap report against direct competitors to see who's linking to them but not me. That surfaced some solid dofollow targets in the Spanish edu space — sites like wwwhatsnew.com, tiching.com, and educacion3cero.com — plus SlideShare and GitHub's awesome-lists, which are easy to underestimate.

I've already got a piece live on tiching.com (waiting on indexing), a SlideShare deck, and an academic-style writeup on Academia.edu. Content-wise, the trick has been writing for each platform's actual community — a forum post on beUnicoos.com reads nothing like a LinkedIn bio.

Tools I'm using to keep myself honest:
Ahrefs for backlink monitoring, Google Search Console to check what's actually indexed (these two disagree with each other more than you'd think), and PrimeIndexer to speed up indexing on new links.

Open question for this community:
For anyone who's grown an educational/niche-language site — how long did it realistically take before a handful of quality dofollow links started showing up in ranking movement? Trying to calibrate my patience here.

Happy to share more specifics on the backlink-gap process if useful to anyone else fighting the "indexed vs crawled vs ranked" confusion.