LittleStorySemrush will hand you a competitor's entire referring-domain list in a few clicks, and most of it turns out to be forum replies and blog comments. The hard part is not finding the sites. It is writing something a moderator leaves alone.
SEOLink BuildingIndie DevThe comment that vanished overnight
On the fourth night in a row my daughter asked for the same story — the one built from a photo of the neighbour's cat. LittleStory takes one photo, a few seconds of your own voice and a single sentence, and hands back an illustrated bedtime story you can play in the voice you recorded.
The same evening, once she was asleep, I pasted a comment into a parenting forum thread about bedtime routines. It explained what the app does and ended with a link. By morning it was gone — no notification, no reason given. So I rewrote it: three sentences about what had actually happened in our house that week, the link at the end. That one is still there.
Free backlinks are comments someone kept
Almost everything I had been calling link building is, at the free end, leaving a comment where a human might read it — a blog reply, a forum answer, a niche thread that has been quietly alive for years. Semrush makes the list easy: put a competitor's domain in, open Referral Domains, and you get every site linking to them along with the exact page the link sits on. Open a handful and the pattern repeats: an ordinary account, an ordinary reply, a link.
The sites worth having are moderated, and that is the point. Read the thread before writing in it. If everyone is politely answering the original question, do that too — promotional phrasing trips the same filter every single time. I paste the thread into an AI and ask what a regular participant would actually say, then rewrite it in my own words, because the first draft always reads like a press release.
The platform decides what a link looks like
You do not choose the syntax, the thread does. Four forms cover nearly everything: an HTML anchor tag, `[url=...]anchor[/url]` on older forums, `[text](url)` Markdown on developer blogs, and a bare URL that the platform linkifies for you. One link, four costumes, and no way to predict which one a given site wants until you look.
Many of these forums are multilingual, and replies written in the language of the thread seem to survive slightly more often. Not a rule — just a hunch worth testing against your own list.
Keep a list of the doors already open
The best byproduct of an afternoon like this is not the links, it is the list. Some forums want an account and a week of probation; others let you post in thirty seconds. Write those down. Next time you launch something you will have twenty or thirty starter links ready in half an hour instead of a weekend spent begging strangers for resources.
Which is roughly the lesson from that deleted comment. The link that stayed was not the one explaining the product — it was the one where I had actually told someone what happened in my house. My daughter has asked for the same story four nights running. Somebody else's kid almost certainly has too, and that is something you learn from a comment long before you learn it from a landing page.