I submitted 35 pull requests to GitHub Awesome Lists in one week — here's the link-building strategy

My blog is 33 days old. No DA. No backlinks worth speaking of. Bing literally told me "not enough inbound links to evaluate."

So I went looking for the highest-authority backlinks I could get without paying for them.

The answer: GitHub Awesome Lists.

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What are Awesome Lists?

They're curated community lists on GitHub — "awesome-investing," "awesome-productivity," etc. Most have DA 95+ (it's github.com). Many have thousands of stars. When your link gets merged, it's a dofollow backlink from one of the most trusted domains on the internet.

The pattern is always the same: fork the repo → edit README → submit pull request → wait for merge.

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My process

gh repo fork owner/awesome-something --clone

edit README.md to add your link

gh pr create --title "Add [Your Tool]" --body "..."

I targeted lists where my content actually belonged:

• awesome-ai-tools → my AI experiment posts and tools
• awesome-productivity → my Standup Timer tool
• awesome-mental-health → my psychology quiz tools
• awesome-interactive-learning → my 100 life simulators

35 PRs submitted over 7 days.

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The 5 repos most likely to actually merge your PR

Based on recent activity (maintainers who merged PRs in the last 12 months):

1. mahseema/awesome-ai-tools ⭐5.6k — merged 3 PRs in August 2025. Most active maintainer I found.
2. dreamingechoes/awesome-mental-health ⭐3.6k — last push May 2025, still responsive
3. jyguyomarch/awesome-productivity ⭐3.3k — maintained, has clear contribution guidelines
4. Alex0x47/awesome-indie-hackers-tools ⭐61 — small but IH-specific, maintainer active Dec 2024
5. eastlakeside/awesome-productivity-cn — Chinese productivity list, niche but active

Skip repos where the last merged PR was 2+ years ago. I wasted several PRs on dead repos before I started checking.

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Results so far

• 35 open PRs across different repos
• 6 github.io backlinks already showing in Bing indexing
• 0 cost
• Some maintainers respond within hours, some repos are clearly abandoned

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Is this worth doing?

For a brand new site with no authority: yes. It's the highest ROI link-building I've found that doesn't require money or relationships.

It won't rank you overnight. But github.com links pointing at your domain tell Google the site exists and is being discovered — which for a 33-day-old blog, that's the signal you need most.

Happy to answer questions or share the full list of repos I targeted.