Boost Your SEO With Substack Backlinks in 2026

I just found out that Substack loves SEO

(I’m not advocating abusing Substack’s platform to rank higher on Google Search results, this is for educational purposes only)

It is well known that backlinks helps with SEO.

But did you know that you can use Substack for backlinking ?

But first…

For the folks who don’t know what are backlinks, let me give you a little intro.

What are backlinks ?

Backlinks are links on a website that links to another website.

If on my blog I have a link to your blog, that’s a backlink.

Why are backlinks important ?

When Google’s bots go around and scrape websites, it takes into consideration links found on those websites.

So when a high authority website like Forbes has your website link on it, for Google that means your website is of high confidence and authority.

But keep in mind not all backlinks are the same.

Some backlinks help with SEO and others don’t.

When you have a backlink of your domain on a higher authority website, you have to make sure that the link is a “dofollow“ not a “nofollow“.

This is crucial when it comes to creating SEO backlinks, you HAVE to make sure that the website where you’re having your website links on are “dofollow” links.

Because you’ll be wasting your time writing that guest article and have your website linked at the end thinking that you’re getting an SEO boost.

But why does it matter ?

What’s the difference between “dofollow” and “nofollow” links?

dofollow

dofollow links are crawled by search engines like Google and when they’re present on high authority websites the linked website gets SEO “link juice“ and gains more authority and this helps with getting indexed higher on Google Search.

nofollow

nofollow links are ignored by search engines and aren’t crawled, meaning that those links don’t get any SEO benefits even if they’re present on high authority websites.

But how do you know if a link is a “dofollow” or a “nofollow“ ?

Well, it’s simple:

When you “Inspect” a page and you see the “rel=nofollow“ tag it means that search engines will ignore the link and not crawl it.

If you don’t see a “nofollow“ tag it means it’s a “dofollow“ link and search engines will crawl the link.

And you cannot make a “nofollow“ link become a “dofollow“ link, it’s out of your control and platform dependent.

Usually on social media platforms ALL links are “nofollow” to avoid gaming Google Search rankings by spamming links everywhere, you can already imagine the disaster…

Substack is good for SEO

I noticed something on Substack a couple days ago as of writing this.

All links are “dofollows“ meaning that when you link your domain on Substack you get SEO “link juice” and that helps with domain authority and trustworthiness.

I was a bit surprised of this finding.

Because it means Substack could potentially be a way to create SEO backlinks to other domains and help rank higher on Google Search.

And keep in mind that Substack is also a blogging platform because your newsletters appear on your Substack website, as you can see all the newsletters I sent to my subscribers are publicly available and archived and some of them are indexed on Google Search like this one:

Google Search result of the keywords “Indonesia remote island“

So Substack is doing great for SEO.

But it get’s even better, here’s why.

When I run “Inspect“ on links in my Substack newsletter, I don’t see any “nofollow“ tags on my links, which means Google will crawl those links and give them authority through Substack’s domain authority:

“nofollow“ tags aren’t present on link in Substack newsletters

And by the way, Substack isn’t a small domain either it ranks really well on Google Search results:

Substack SEO domain authority score on Semrush.

Medium on the other hand, links are all “nofollows“ meaning that you get no SEO benefits when your domain is linked on Medium.

When I run “Inspect“ on links in my Medium blog articles, I see rel=”noopener ugc nofollow” which is a “nofollow“ tag:

Even though Medium domain authority is bigger than Substack, having your links on it won’t give you an SEO boost:

Medium SEO domain authority score on Semrush, notice how it blows away Substack

That’s why making sure your backlinks are “dofollow“ is important and a website being of high authority means nothing if all your links are “nofollow“. (i.e Medium)

I’m not saying Substack should be used solely for SEO backlinking because I’m pretty sure that goes against Substack’s TOS, but whenever you do you get some SEO juice. 🧃

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