I built a link exchange tool that only matches sites in the same niche

I run a few content sites, and getting backlinks is the part that never gets easier. The usual route is trading links with other site owners, which means forum threads and cold emails, and two things went wrong every time.

First, almost nothing on offer was relevant. Someone running a finance blog wants a link from a finance site, not from whoever happened to reply. Irrelevant links do very little, so most of the conversations were wasted before they started.

Second, and more annoying: I'd agree a swap, publish my link, and then find out the person I'd been talking to didn't actually have access to the site. No admin login, no way to add anything. My link was live, theirs never appeared.

So I built AnyBacklink. Two decisions that fix those specific problems:

Every site is tagged with three keywords, and you only see sites sharing them. Search "watches" and you get sites about watches. No browsing a general directory hoping something fits.

Every site has to be verified before it's visible to anyone — upload a text file to your root, same idea as Search Console. If you can't put a file on the domain, you can't list it, which means everyone you talk to can actually place a link.

The part I went back and forth on: nothing is public. No crawlable member list, no feed of who swapped with whom, no domains visible outside the login. A public directory of sites looking for links is a pattern search engines can spot, and it would put every member in it. Costs me all the SEO value the site could have had for itself, which felt like the right trade.

Built on Next.js and Supabase. Free, nothing to buy, no links sold — it introduces two owners and gets out of the way.

It's at anybacklink.com. Early days, so feedback is genuinely useful, particularly on whether three keywords is the right number.