Do Substack Links Count as Backlinks?

A link in the email itself counts for nothing — email lands in an inbox, not on the web, and no crawler ever sees it. What can count is the newsletter's web archive: Substack, beehiiv and Ghost publish every issue as a public, indexable page, and a link on that page is an ordinary backlink. Most Mailchimp-style campaigns have no such page at all.

The distinction everyone misses

Ask "do newsletter links count" and you are really asking two unrelated questions that happen to share a word.

The email is not a web page. It is a message delivered to an inbox, sitting behind a login, rendered by a mail client. Googlebot cannot request it, index it, or follow anything in it. A link sent to 50,000 subscribers has exactly the same link value as a link written on a napkin: zero. This is not a nofollow situation — the page simply does not exist as far as search is concerned.

The archive is a web page. Substack publishes each post at a public URL. beehiiv and Ghost do the same. These are real HTML pages that get crawled, indexed, and rank in Google like anything else. A link inside one of those posts is a genuine backlink, subject to the same rules as a link on any blog.

So the practical question is never "was I in the newsletter". It is: does a public archive page exist, is it indexed, and is my link followed?

How to check in ninety seconds

Do not take a platform's word for any of this — attributes change without announcement. Check the specific page:

Find the public URL. Substack posts live at publication.substack.com/p/slug, or on a custom domain. In a Mailchimp or ConvertKit email, look for a "view in browser" link at the top.
Confirm it is indexed. Paste the URL into Google with site: in front. Nothing returned means it is not in the index and cannot be helping you.
Read the link attribute. Open the page, right-click your link, Inspect, and look at the <a> tag for rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc". That single attribute decides whether ranking value passes, as dofollow vs nofollow explains.
Check the domain it credits. A link on someone.substack.com is a link from a subdomain of substack.com, not from an independent domain — which affects how much a new referring domain it really represents.

Most email platforms fail step one or two. Mailchimp campaign archives are frequently disabled by the sender, and many that exist are excluded from indexing. If there is no crawlable page, there is no link, and no amount of subscriber count changes that.

Where the value genuinely comes from

Here is the part that matters, and it is not the link.

A newsletter mention puts you in front of several thousand people who own websites. In any B2B or creator niche, a meaningful slice of a newsletter's readership runs a site, writes a blog, maintains documentation, or curates a resource page. Some fraction of them will write about you afterwards — and those links are editorial, in-content, followed links on independent domains.

Newsletter link building is audience-mediated. The newsletter does not give you a link; it causes links, one step removed. This is the same mechanism behind podcast appearances and most digital PR: the placement is the distribution, and the links are the second-order effect.

Which reframes how you pitch. Stop asking a newsletter operator for a backlink — a request that reads as spam and gets ignored. Ask to be useful to their readers, and judge the placement by whether those readers are the kind of people who publish.

Getting into newsletters worth being in

Target curated industry roundups, not general-interest sends. A 2,000-subscriber newsletter read by operators in your niche is worth more than a 200,000-subscriber consumer list.
Lead with the asset, not the ask. Original data, a free tool, a genuinely different take. Curators need things worth including; that is the entire trade.
Pitch the archive-publishing ones first. A newsletter with an indexed web archive gives you the audience effect and a real backlink. One that sends only to inboxes gives you the first alone.
Tag every link with UTM parameters so newsletter referrals show up properly in analytics instead of collapsing into direct traffic.
Link a resource, not your homepage. Send readers to the thing the mention promised, which is also the page you want linked when they write about you.
Do not buy newsletter placements for links. Paid inclusion that passes followed links is buying links, and the archive page makes it visible. If you sponsor for reach, that is advertising — treat it as such.

Running your own newsletter: put it on your domain

If you publish a newsletter yourself, one structural decision outweighs everything else.

Every archive page you publish on yourname.substack.com builds Substack's domain. Every link a reader gives that archive points at Substack. You are renting the audience and donating the SEO.

Substack, beehiiv and Ghost all support mapping a custom domain, and the strongest version is hosting the archive in a subfolder of your own site — yoursite.com/newsletter — so every issue is a page on the domain you are trying to rank. Over two years of weekly sends, that is a hundred indexed pages contributing to topical authority on your own domain instead of someone else's.

It costs nothing. It is the single highest-leverage newsletter SEO decision, and it is almost always made by accident on day one.

Frequently asked questions

Do newsletter links count as backlinks? Links inside the email do not — email is not crawlable, so no search engine ever sees them. Links on the newsletter's public web archive page do count, provided that page exists and is indexed. Most newsletters have no such page.

Do Substack links count as backlinks? Yes, when they appear in a published post. Substack posts are public, crawlable web pages, so links in them are real backlinks. Check the rel attribute on the specific link to see whether ranking value passes, and note that a .substack.com link comes from a subdomain of Substack rather than an independent domain.

Does email marketing help SEO? Indirectly and genuinely, but not through links. Email drives engaged repeat visitors, brings readers to pages that then get shared and cited, and puts your work in front of people who publish. None of that is link equity; all of it moves rankings eventually.

Are Substack backlinks nofollow? Do not rely on a general answer — inspect the link. Platforms adjust link attributes on user-generated content without announcing it, and the answer can differ between post body links, comment links and profile links on the same platform.

Should I move my newsletter off Substack for SEO? Not necessarily off it, but onto your own domain. Substack supports custom domains, and publishing the archive under your domain means every issue builds your site instead of substack.com. That is the change worth making, and it does not require leaving the platform.

Can I get a backlink by being mentioned in someone's newsletter? Sometimes directly, if they publish an archive. Reliably indirectly, because newsletter readers in professional niches include people who run sites and cite what they read. Treat the mention as distribution and the links as the downstream result.

Do links in email signatures help SEO? No. Signatures are email, and email is not crawled. The same link in your forum profile, author bio or social profiles at least sits on a web page, though usually a nofollowed one.

The bottom line

Judge a newsletter link by whether a public, indexed archive page exists — that is the whole test, and it takes ninety seconds. Then stop optimising for the link and optimise for the readership, because the followed, in-content links you actually want come from the people who read the issue and write about you afterwards. And if you send a newsletter of your own, put the archive on your domain before you send another one.

For the links you need on a predictable schedule rather than whenever a curator obliges, Backlinkster runs one-for-one in-content swaps between owners of related sites, with every placement verified live by code so a link that quietly disappears gets caught. Five swaps a month on the free plan; see the plans.