Dofollow Backlinks: Which Sites Give Them and What One Costs

How many backlinks are dofollow? Our six sites, counted

The six are ours: Submitator, IndexMachine, ShareSpeak, AlterBase, AffyList and Solvitor. For each one we took the 100 referring domains Ahrefs rated highest on 23 October 2026, dropped the rows where one of our sites links another and kept the remaining 590, so a domain linking to three of them counts three times. 192 of those rows, 33%, carry at least one dofollow link. The other 398 carry none, and the split by source is far from even.

Directories and launch sites we submit to are the source most likely to send a followed link: 89 of 135, two in three. Of those 89 followed links, 52 came from directories that ask for their badge on the listed site, required or optional, and where the badge is required the link was followed 41 times in 42.

At the other end sit 265 referring domains on .store and .shop. They are 153 distinct domains, 137 of them with seo, rank, link or serp in the name. Ahrefs rates them from DR 18 to DR 61, and three of their 265 rows carry a followed link. They take up room in a list of strongest referring domains, and Domain Rating counts followed links, so 262 of those rows add nothing to it. Everything else, from newsletters to tools to directories outside our list, lands in between at 53%. Each site's own rating and count are in our post that reads the six one by one, and where the strongest followed ones came from, kind by kind, in our post on where those links came from.

High quality dofollow backlinks: the rating is not the rel

Lists sell high authority dofollow backlinks and high DA dofollow backlinks, and both phrases lean on a score. Domain Authority is Moz's score and Domain Rating is Ahrefs'. Both describe the linking domain as a whole, while the rel is set on one anchor on one page, and no domain score looks at it. The same 590 referring domains, banded by DR:

Above DR 30, the higher the band, the more often the link is followed: 64 of 94 at DR 70 and up, 53 of 105 at DR 50 to 69 and 52 of 361 at DR 30 to 49, where 250 of the 361 rows are the .store and .shop domains. The 30 rows under DR 30 all link to AlterBase, the directory among our six, and 23 of them are followed. From DR 50 up the directories we submit to were followed more often than every other site: 42 of 53 against 22 of 41 at DR 70 and up, 38 of 58 against 14 of 33 at DR 50 to 69. A high quality dofollow backlink is a followed link, on a page that can be indexed, from a site people use; the rating comes after those, and how to read a Domain Rating is a question of its own.

Which websites have dofollow backlinks

The source decides the rel more than the rating does. A directory sets one rule for every listing, a platform sets one for every profile or comment and an editor decides one link at a time. By kind, with what we found for each:

Two of those rows are links people search for by name. Dofollow profile backlinks are scarce: the website field on GitHub, Gravatar and DEV profiles carried nofollow or ugc when we read them for our post on links that cost nothing. Dofollow comment backlinks run into the blog software: WordPress's own reference builds a commenter's name link with ugc by default, and adds nofollow and external when it points off the site.

Dofollow backlink lists, and why a list is not a count

The pages that rank for dofollow backlink sites are a Medium post that keeps growing, a Google Sites page with the year in the title, a slide deck of 450+ sites and long lists of web 2.0 and profile sites. Several titles advertise DA, PA or DR. A rating is a fact about a domain, though, and the rel is a fact about one link on one page, set by rules that move.

Three things move it. A badge: CurlShip's free card reads “Listed, nofollow. Add the badge to make it dofollow.” A fee: the cards in the price table below. And time: a directory that changes its template changes every new listing, which is why our evidence list of followed directories prints a dated count of live listings beside each row. So treat any list of dofollow backlinks, ours included, as leads to check against live pages. A dofollow backlinks website list of 450 domains is 450 checks you have not run yet.

Buy dofollow backlinks? What a directory charges for one

Some directories sell the followed link outright, and their own cards put a price on it. These five are directories we submit to, and every price was read on their pages on 4 November 2026.

Read across, the cards price the badge. Wall of Tools, EasyLaunch and CurlShip say on the free card itself that their badge brings the followed link, so the fee buys that link with the badge left off your site: $9, $15 and $30. EasyLaunch's $15 card, “Pick any day”, adds a launch on the day you choose and 48 hours pinned. SaaS.fyi asks for its badge on the Free tier and puts “Dofollow backlink to your site” on its $99 Premium card, yet when our guide read all 115 of its listing pages on 11 October 2026, every link to a listed product was followed, 230 of 230. Launching Next asks no badge at all. Its 26 newest full listings, the ones with a description, were followed on our 23 October 2026 count, and every one of its promotions, from $500 a month, lists a “DR 51 Dofollow Backlink”.

On the four with a badge, the badge route is the one we file, and the badge becomes our job: it rides in the one component on your site, and keeping it live is on us, with no commit from you per directory, so the condition on the free card keeps holding. What Google's spam policies say about directory links is read line by line in our post on the directory line in that policy.

Cheap dofollow backlinks and packs of 100

When a cheap offer to buy dofollow backlinks is a count, say 100 dofollow backlinks for one price, the count says nothing about which domains, what rel or which pages. Ask for the domains, open a few of their live pages, read the rel on the link and look up each rating with our free Domain Rating lookup. For our plans the answers sit in one table: the catalog lists every directory we submit to, with its Domain Rating, its link type and whether it asks for a badge.

How to find dofollow backlinks, and check each one

How to find backlink sites that pass a followed link: work from links that exist, not from lists.

1. Pull the referring domains of two or three competitors from a backlink tool and keep the ones that send dofollow links. Ahrefs, the source of our own count, records that for every domain.
2. Keep the sources you can act on. A directory or launch site takes an application; an article or a review needs its writer to choose you.
3. Open three of each site's newest listings and read the link to the listed product. Its rel should hold none of nofollow, ugc and sponsored, and its address should lead to the product itself. How to check a link on the live page, step by step, is in our post on dofollow and nofollow.
4. Look up the site's rating, then see how a listing will show your page: some directories build the listing from your title, description and image.
5. Once your listing is live, read its link the same way, and make sure the listing page can be found: how a new listing page gets indexed has a post of its own.

How to get dofollow backlinks

Get them where a site's own rules hand them out. Directories and launch sites come first, because their newest listings tell you what yours will carry; then partners and integrations that list the products they work with; then editorial links, which follow original data or a free tool somebody wants to cite. Every way to earn a backlink, with what each costs, is compared in one post, and if your domain is new, a startup's first months of SEO puts the links in order with the rest of the work.

How to create dofollow backlinks yourself: the platform sets the rel

The links you can create yourself are profiles, comments, forum posts and web 2.0 blogs, and the platform that hosts each one sets the rel: nofollow on a GitHub profile, ugc and nofollow on a WordPress comment, ugc in a Hashnode article. DEV article bodies are the exception we measured, so the web 2.0 row above leaves the call to the platform. How to make dofollow backlinks, in practice, is to be listed or cited by a site whose template leaves the link plain, and to keep whatever it asks in return.

Dofollow backlinks for SEO: what a followed link does

A dofollow backlink is a link a search engine may count toward the page it points at, and it is the kind Ahrefs counts toward Domain Rating. A nofollow link can still send readers, but it is not the link a rating is built from, which is why a followed link from a site in your field is worth the work.

What a followed link does for one page depends on the site sending it, on the listing page being crawled and on the pages you compete with, so no one can sell you the effect. Count followed referring domains rather than links, keep the conditions that keep them followed and measure the pages you want to beat for the number.

Dofollow backlinks from directories, filed for you

Submitator works the source that came out ahead in our count. You tick directories in the dashboard, each with its Domain Rating on screen, from the 189 we submit to, and a directory joins that list once a submission to it has run from start to finish. Every directory then gets a description written for it, to its own limits, every form gets filled and the CAPTCHAs never reach you.

The badge directories ask one thing of your site, and it happens once: a single component carries the badge of each directory you picked that asks for one, EasyLaunch and Wall of Tools among them, and keeping every badge live is our job, with no commit from you for any directory. On every order we also push your new listing pages through IndexMachine, the free indexing ($25 value) that comes with Starter, Growth and Scale, and you set up nothing; whether Google indexes a page stays Google's call.

The timing is written down: most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours, every directory within 21 days at most. When a directory rejects your submission, the default is one more directory for you to pick, on every plan but All Directories, which holds the whole catalog already. And a refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms.

Paid once, the plans run $29 for 30 directories (Starter), $49 for 60 (Growth) and $79 for 100 (Scale); All Directories, at $149, takes the whole catalog and every directory that joins it later. EasyLaunch's $15 card buys one followed listing with no badge; our $29 files 30 directories you choose, EasyLaunch among them if you tick it, on its badge route with the badge in place.