I run a small link-in-bio SaaS. Like every other founder with a new domain and no authority, I went looking for the "100 free dofollow backlink sites" lists.
So I wrote a script and checked them. Twenty platforms, one at a time, on real published pages.
Not because the lists lie about rel. They're often right about rel. They're just measuring the wrong thing — and the way they're wrong is interesting enough to be worth writing down, because the same four failure modes explain almost every result.
Nothing clever. Fetch a real published listing page, pull the robots meta, the canonical, and the rel of every outbound anchor:
Run it against a competitor's listing, not your own — you want to see what the platform actually publishes, not what it promises.
Two of the most-recommended "free dofollow" platforms do this to free accounts specifically: A popular hosted-changelog product gives you a public changelog page with genuinely followed links. The free plan force-noindexes that page. Indexing is a paid upgrade. A large GIF platform's brand channels render the website field as rel="noopener noreferrer" — followed. User channels stay noindex until the brand is verified.
Both were on every list I read. Neither list mentioned the robots meta. rel on a noindex page is worth nothing, and no rel checker will tell you that, because it isn't looking at the head.
One well-known developer-tools directory serves robots: index, follow on its tool pages, and the vendor link is rel="noopener noreferrer" — followed. Perfect, on the surface.
Homepage. Site-wide. Your page tells Google "I am the homepage." A canonical is a strong hint, and while Google can reject it, you are betting your link on that rejection. I could not prove those pages get indexed independently, and I'm not going to claim they do.
I measured three launch platforms with the script. All three: followed vendor links, indexable pages. I wrote them up as "do this."
Then I actually submitted to one. The confirmation email listed "do-follow backlinks" as a benefit of the $49 tier.
Go back and look at the others with that in mind and the pattern is obvious: One directory's product links are rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer", while the sponsor slots on the very same page are rel="noopener" — followed. Same HTML, same template, two different link policies, sorted by who paid. Another platform's free tier requires a reciprocal badge on your own site. Not one of the five followed listings I sampled had that badge anywhere on their site — meaning those five almost certainly weren't free listings at all.
rel · robots · canonical · and which pricing tier was the page you measured published under?
A live page's rel is evidence about that listing. It is not evidence about yours. You often cannot know until your own page goes live — which means the honest answer for a queued free submission is "unproven," not "dofollow."
Worth checking before you spend an hour on a submission form: A large software-comparison site: index, follow, self-canonical, dedicated category pages, comparison pages — and zero outbound anchors to the vendor. The whole page is about the product and never links to it. A startup directory whose homepage is full of followed outbound links (they're sponsor slots) while the permanent detail page for each listing links nowhere. An integrations marketplace with a page per app and no link to the app's own site.
And two that block it at a completely different layer: A PR-source platform's expert directory looked like a free profile with a website field. Its robots.txt:
Every profile URL is also signed with a token and redirects to the login page without one. The WordPress.org plugin directory. Everyone "knows" it's a high-authority free dofollow. Every vendor link on a plugin page is rel="nofollow ugc". Writing a plugin can be great distribution. It is not a link.
| Outcome | Count | |---|---| | Followed and indexable and actually free | 1 | | Followed but noindex on the free plan | 2 | | Followed but canonicalized away | 1 | | Followed only on paid listings (or unproven for free) | 3 | | nofollow | 5 | | No outbound link at all | 5 | | Blocked by robots.txt / no crawlable page | 3 |