I thought I had 332 backlinks. I have one. Also a claim on my own site was wrong for four weeks.
Same disclosure as always: I test tools firsthand on my own site (solostacklab.net) before writing about them. I'm an affiliate for some of the tools I mention, not all. For this post: Ahrefs has no affiliate program, and Semrush declined my application.
Three things from this week.
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I thought I had 332 backlinks. I have one.
I signed up for Ahrefs Free (free if you verify you own the site), because Google Search Console's Links report has never shown me anything. Ahrefs showed 332 referring domains. Then I actually read the list. Only one is a real site: indiehackers.com, 5 links, none of them dofollow. Nearly all the rest are auto-generated "SEO services" style pages that inserted my domain, and Ahrefs flags them as spam itself. It added 213 new domains in the last 30 days. Google's own help says most sites don't need to disavow, so I'm doing nothing. Weird feeling to be excited about a number for a few minutes and then find out it was mostly junk. -
A bug only showed up when I looked from the server's side.
I've crawled the site with Screaming Frog and Semrush, and I have my own check script. All three said fine. Then I opened Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control page to see which bots were visiting, and started poking at the URLs they were requesting. Every URL that doesn't exist on my site was returning a 200 with the homepage, not a 404. That's a soft 404. My guess is the crawlers missed it because they only follow links that exist, so they never asked for a page that isn't there. I added a real 404 page. -
One of my own published claims was wrong for four weeks.
In my Semrush review I wrote that the www version of my domain redirects to the main one. I never re-tested it after writing that. It was serving a full duplicate copy of the whole site with a 200. Found it this week, added a proper 301, and put a dated correction on the page instead of quietly editing it.
Question for anyone who's been through this: how did you get your first genuine, non-spam backlink on a new domain? I keep reading "make something people want to cite," which doesn't tell me what you actually did.
Your soft 404 has a second life in analytics: a 200 that serves the homepage logs as a real pageview on a URL you never published. The only place I ever see those URLs is bot request logs, since nothing links to them. That's why we keep assistant and bot hits out of visitor counts in amami.dev.
Hadn't thought about the analytics side at all. I use Clarity, which as far as I know only records when its script runs in a browser, so plain bot hits shouldn't show up. I haven't checked whether crawlers that execute JS leaked in, though. Worth a look.
The number I would watch is not 332, it is 213 added in thirty days. That is not a one off scrape, it means the domain is in an active list that regenerates, so the count keeps climbing and every backlink figure you see from here is mostly noise. Which makes right now the moment to write down the one real link, while it is still countable by hand. Agree on doing nothing about disavow, though the reason is worth stating: those pages are already ignored rather than harmless, so disavowing mostly costs you an afternoon.
Fair point on watching the 213 instead of the 332, I'll track that number rather than the total. And "ignored rather than harmless" is a better way to put the disavow reason than mine. Thanks.
The 332 → 1 realization is probably one of the more useful SEO lessons here. It’s so easy to look at a dashboard number and assume it represents something meaningful without checking what’s actually behind it.
For a new site, I’m starting to think the first real backlink is less about “doing SEO” and more about creating a reason for another person to reference the site specifically. A useful tool, original dataset, detailed experiment, or genuinely useful comparison seems much more likely to earn a real link than another generic piece of content.
I also really like that you left the incorrect claim visible with a dated correction instead of quietly changing it. That kind of transparency probably matters more for long-term trust than having a perfectly clean-looking archive.
Thanks Dana 🙂 Agreed on giving someone a specific reason to reference the site. That's the part I'm still working on. The dated correction felt awkward to write, but it seemed worse to leave the wrong claim sitting there.
The 332 thing only means something because you opened the list. I usually stop at the count and then I repeat it like it's real. Same with the www redirect claim that was wrong for four weeks. You wrote it, felt done, never hit the URL again. I do that with my own notes way more than I want to admit. Dated correction instead of quietly rewriting it is the part I wouldn't have done.
Yeah, that one stung. I wrote it down as done and never re-tested it, so the claim just sat there for a month.
Two things in your post are more connected than they look.
On the "332 → 1" discovery: this is the single most useful lesson about link metrics. Referring-domain counts in every tool are polluted by exactly this auto-generated junk, and dofollow-vs-nofollow matters far less than whether the linking page has real traffic and editorial intent. Your indiehackers.com links are worth more than the other 327 combined — nofollow has been a hint, not a directive, since 2019, and those links still drive crawl discovery. The metric worth watching in Ahrefs isn't the count, it's how many new referring domains have their own organic traffic.
On the soft-404 catch: that's the bigger deal of the two, and your diagnosis is right. Client-side crawlers only request URLs they can find, so a "200 for everything" misconfiguration is invisible to Screaming Frog-style checks. This matters doubly right now: AI answer-engine crawlers (Perplexity, ChatGPT browsing, AI Overviews' fetchers) decide what to ingest based on clean status codes and well-formed responses. A site full of soft 404s can get quietly deprioritized in AI indexes with zero signal in Search Console. I'd extend your server-side habit into a permanent check: curl your site with a bot user-agent, request a nonexistent path, and diff the status codes against what a browser gets. Discrepancies between what you serve browsers vs. crawlers are where the expensive bugs hide.
On your actual question: "make something people want to cite" is vague advice, but there's a concrete version. Find threads — here, Reddit, niche forums — where someone says "does anyone have a source for that?" and nobody answers well. Publish the definitive, quotable answer, then go reply with it where the question was asked. Those comments are backlink requests wearing a costume: citing you becomes the cheapest way for the other person to sound credible. That's where first real links come from for most people — not outreach, not directories, just answering a question nobody had answered properly.
I did run a version of the bot user-agent check. A spoofed UA from my own machine isn't a real crawler though, so Cloudflare's IP-verified bot logs turned out to be the more useful signal. Do you have a source for AI crawlers deprioritizing sites with soft 404s? I haven't seen one.
First real backlinks I got came from answering a specific question somewhere people already search, with a link only when it actually solved the problem. Directory dumps mostly look like those fake referring domains. One useful page beats volume.
That's the pattern I keep reading about, but I can't picture the "where". Was it Reddit, a forum, Stack Overflow, something niche? I've been answering questions on IH and Reddit for a few weeks without a link and none of it has turned into a backlink yet, so I'm curious what kind of question it was.
The “332 backlinks → actually one” discovery is painful 😅
I think the hardest part with SEO numbers is that the metric can look like progress until you inspect where it actually came from.
For genuine backlinks, I’ve found that being useful in the right communities seems more realistic than chasing backlink numbers directly.
Curious — are you mainly trying to build backlinks for SEO, or are you also looking for referral traffic from the sites linking to you?
Mostly SEO. As of last week's Search Console, most of my pages sit around positions 3-8 for their queries but get almost no impressions, so I'm treating it as a trust problem more than a traffic problem. Referral traffic would be a bonus, but I'd take a real link first.