How to get backlinks for your indie game

A released game ends up linked from plenty of places: its itch.io page, its Steam page, a wiki entry, a few community threads. Most of those links do less for search than they look like they do. When we read the page source on October 11, 2026, itch.io marked the links in a game's description nofollow, Steam sent the developer's website link through its own link filter, and Wikipedia marked every external link nofollow.

Those links still send players, so keep them. The links that tell Google your site deserves to rank have to come from somewhere else. This guide covers where a game, a studio site or a small gaming site can earn them, how to tell which kind a link is, and the shortcuts Google treats as spam.

The direct answer

Backlinks for an indie game come from five places, roughly in order of effort:

1. Every profile and store page you already have. Put your official site in the website field on itch.io, Steam, your engine's showcase and your social profiles. Most of these links are nofollow or redirected, but they send players and help search engines find the site.
2. A Bounty Board game page. Creating an account is free, and adding a game to it has no charge. The page links to your official site, store page and socials as plain followed links, and it opens to search once the description reaches 100 words.
3. A press page on your own domain. A writer who can copy your facts, screenshots and trailer from one page tends to link to that page.
4. Coverage earned with a playable build. Journalists, newsletter writers and creators who have played the game have something to link to. A pitch with no build gives them nothing.
5. Communities, jams and devlogs, for players first. Your own posts there rarely count for ranking, but the people who find you there are the ones who write about the game later.

Skip anything that trades money, keys or links for links. Google's spam policies name each version, quoted below.

Pick one home for every link

Google says it "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl," and that anchor text, the visible words of a link, "tells people and Google something about the page you're linking to" (link best practices).

So decide which URL is your game's home before you collect a single link. If the game has its own site, that is the home. If it does not, the Steam page or itch.io page is. Then use that same URL, and your game's real name as the link text, everywhere you control. Links split across an old jam page, a dead domain and three store pages add up to less than the same links pointed at one place.

Followed, nofollow and redirected links

A link's rel attribute tells search engines how to treat it. Google's guide to qualifying outbound links defines three values: sponsored for "advertisements or paid placements," ugc for user generated content such as comments and forum posts, and nofollow when neither applies and the site would rather Google not associate itself with the linked page.

None of them is a hard wall. Google's 2019 announcement says all three "are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search," and nofollow became a hint for crawling and indexing on March 1, 2020. A hint is not a promise either way, so a followed link is still the one to want.

Here is what we found in the page source of each site on October 11, 2026:

You can check any site the same way. Open the page, view the source, find the link and read its rel value. If it says nofollow, ugc or sponsored, or the href points at a redirect, the link is there for people, which is still a good reason to keep it.

Your Bounty Board game page

Bounty Board is a marketplace where studios run campaigns with gaming creators, plus a free browser game Arcade. Every game a studio adds gets its own page at bountyboard.gg/game/your-game, and once that page is open to search it is listed in the games directory.

The Details panel on that page links to:

• your official site, shown as its host name
• your store or play link, as a Wishlist on Steam button when it points to Steam
• whichever of Discord, X, Bluesky, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram and Reddit you add

Each one is a plain link with no nofollow. Because noreferrer hides the referring page from your analytics, every link also carries utm_source=bountyboard, so the visit still shows up as a Bounty Board referral. If your site does not declare a canonical URL yet, add one. Google's guide to duplicate URLs says a canonical tag helps search engines "consolidate the signals they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) into a single, preferred URL." The page's structured data also lists your official site and socials as sameAs for the game, which tells search engines the page and your site describe the same game.

Two things decide whether the link is worth having:

Write at least 100 words about the game. A game page with a shorter description stays out of search, marked noindex, until the description reaches 100 words or a creator completes paid work for the game. Google's spam policies list "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as link spam, and the word floor is what keeps a listing from being one. A page that is only a name and a link never reaches the index.

Use the home URL you picked. The Website field should hold the same URL you put everywhere else.

If the game runs in a browser, an Arcade listing adds a second page. Submitting is free, the Arcade holds descriptions to the same 100 word floor, and the game's page shows your store and social links as buttons, marked the same way.

Listing never requires a link back to Bounty Board. Game pages offer an optional badge for your own site, and leaving it off changes nothing about your listing.

Keep the scale honest. Bounty Board is a younger and smaller site than itch.io or Steam, so one followed link from it is one small signal, not a ranking fix. What it gives you is a real page about your game, with your game's name on it, pointing at the URL you chose.

Build a press page worth linking to

presskit() was "created in just over a week by Rami Ismail of Dutch independent game studio Vlambeer," and it is free. You do not need the tool to copy its idea: one page that holds everything a writer needs.

Host it on your own domain at an address that will not change, such as yourgame.com/press. Put the release date, platforms, price, developer, a contact email, a short and a long description, full resolution screenshots, the trailer and logo files on it. Link it from your site's footer and from every pitch. A writer who takes the facts from that page has a reason to link to it, and that page is on your domain.

Earn coverage with something people can play

A playable build, a key or a browser link turns a pitch into something a journalist or creator can check in five minutes. Our guide to finding and hiring gaming creators covers who to approach first. Give each of them your home URL and press page, and ask that any link point there.

Ask, do not require. Google's link spam examples include "Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link." Sending review keys is normal. Making a link the price of a key is the problem.

Paid coverage follows the same logic. Bounty Board campaigns pay creators for videos, streams and posts, and creators must clearly disclose paid campaign work and free product, including game keys, in the content itself, following the FTC's endorsement guidance and each platform's branded content rules. That work sends players. For search, Google's policy keeps paid links within the rules only when they are "qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value." Our disclosure guide covers the creator side.

Show up in communities, jams and devlogs

Google lists "Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature" as link spam, so a link dropped into every thread you can find works against you.

Post there for players. Enter jams, answer other developers' questions and share builds while they are unfinished. Our guide to getting your first 1,000 browser game players covers which communities are worth the time.

The links come from what you publish on your own domain. A devlog or postmortem with real numbers is the kind of page other developers cite. That same guide links to one solo developer's launch week postmortem on the itch.io forums because it reported player counts and retention that nobody else had published.

What Google calls link spam

Google's spam policies define link spam as "creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings." Besides the product, directory and forum examples above, the list includes:

• "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes," including "Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links"
• "Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking"
• "Using automated programs or services to create links to your site"
• "Requiring a link as part of a Terms of Service, contract, or similar arrangement without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link"

The same page says sites that break these policies "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all." A link you paid or traded for puts the whole site at that risk.

Where to start this week

Pick the home URL. Then open every profile your game has, on itch.io, Steam, your engine's showcase and each social account, and put that URL in the website field. Publish the press page. Add the game on Bounty Board with at least 100 words and the links filled in, and submit it to the Arcade as well if it runs in a browser.

After that, links grow out of coverage and what you publish, which is slower. Google Search Console's Links report shows which sites link to you, so check it once a month rather than once a day.

Sources worth reading

• Google: Spam policies, link spam
• Google: Qualify your outbound links
• Google Search Central blog: Evolving "nofollow"
• Google: Link best practices
• Google: Consolidate duplicate URLs
• presskit()