Do links between my own websites count as backlinks?
Yes, links between your own websites count, but not the way people hope. Google treats them as real links with limited weight, useful for discovery, context, and passing relevance, useless as a rank-inflation scheme. Their honest value is bigger than SEO: referral traffic between your projects and a clear entity picture of who you are.
Does Google penalize linking my sites together?
Not for doing it honestly. Cross-linking a handful of genuinely related sites you openly own is normal web behavior; every company links its products together. What gets sites in trouble is the manipulative version: dozens of thin domains linking to each other purely to simulate popularity, which is a link scheme under Google’s spam policies and has been algorithmically discounted for years. The dividing line is simple: would the link exist if search engines didn’t? A badge on your app pointing to the page listing all your work passes that test. A footer stuffed with twelve keyword-anchored domains does not.
How much SEO value do they actually pass?
Some, honestly less than an independent link. Search engines can see shared ownership signals, shared hosting, registration, analytics, design, and weigh same-owner links accordingly. What your own links are genuinely good at: getting new sites discovered and indexed fast, since crawlers follow links from your established sites to your new one; passing topical context, because the anchor and surrounding text tell engines what the new thing is; and building your name as an entity, since consistent links between your projects and one about-you page teach both Google and AI answer engines that these works share an author. That last one is quietly becoming the important one, as more discovery happens through engines that assemble who-made-this from cross-references.
What’s the right way to structure it?
Hub and spokes. One page, on a domain you’ll keep, that lists you and everything you’ve built. Every project links to the hub; the hub links out to every project. That gives every new launch an instant indexed path, gives every visitor a route to the rest of your work, and concentrates your name’s search equity in one place instead of scattering it. Keep anchors natural (“Built by Kevin”, not “best AI productivity software”), keep the links visible rather than hidden in tiny gray text, and don’t bother with dozens of sitewide cross-links between every pair of projects; the hub is the router.
Is this why makers put badges on their sites?
It’s half of why. A small “Built by” badge in the corner of every project is the hub-and-spoke pattern made mechanical: one consistent, honest, crawlable link per site, all pointing home. The other half is human, a face in the corner telling visitors a person made this. If you want the pattern without hand-writing it, BuiltByBadge generates the badge and the hub and keeps them current from inside your AI assistant; if you’d rather do it by hand, the snippet is three lines and it’s free here. Either way: link your work together. The engines reward the honest version, and your visitors use it more than any engine does.
Built by