I opened the backlink report for LittleStory expecting the homepage at the top. It wasn't there. Sorting by target page showed the same pattern every time: nobody links to a front door. They link to free tools, original data, tutorials and templates — pages with a job. And my own anchor text turned out to be other people's summary of me, which was mostly a bare domain.

SEOIndie DevBacklinks

The link I expected, and the one I found

I opened the backlink report for LittleStory expecting to see the homepage at the top. It was not there. The page with the most links from real sites was a short explainer about recording a bedtime story in your own voice — something I wrote in twenty minutes and nearly deleted.

My daughter makes the same mistake in reverse. She never asks for the app. She asks for the story with the whale, the one where I am the narrator. Neither of us cites the front door.

Three columns, three different questions

The report is mostly three fields. Source URL tells you which page did the linking. Target URL tells you which of your pages they decided was worth pointing at. Anchor Text tells you the words they used to describe you.

Read them separately and it stops being a number. A hundred links from one directory is one sentence repeated a hundred times. Ten links from ten unrelated sites, each with different wording, is a reputation forming.

The pages that get cited are never the front door

Sorting by target page made the pattern obvious and slightly insulting. Nobody links to a homepage. They link to a free tool, a piece of original data, a tutorial, or a template — something with a job.

A homepage makes a claim; a tool page is a thing you can use and then point at. It held here too. The cited page was not about the product. It was about the part of the product a stranger could copy tomorrow.

Your anchor text is other people's summary of you

Then I read my own anchors. Mostly the bare domain, plus a couple of "click here". That is what happens when nobody has a sentence for you yet — they fall back to your name and hope the reader clicks.

So the question changed. It is no longer "where do I go to get links". It is "which of my pages did people already choose, and can I make more of those". For us the answer was the page about a parent's own voice. The backlinks simply agreed with my daughter.

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