Free Backlink Sites: Where Free Links Come From and What They Pass

Sites that give you free backlinks, by type

Every free backlink comes from one of five kinds of site, and each kind takes its fee in effort rather than cash. A directory gives your product a page of its own with a link out. An article platform publishes what you write, links included. A launch site or a community publishes your launch or your post. A profile publishes an account page with a field for your website. What the link is worth then comes down to three things you can read on the live page: the rel on the anchor, the page's robots tag and whether the link points at your domain at all.

The table sets 12 of them side by side, grouped by kind. Its DR column rates the site that would link to you, never the link itself, and a list sorted by domain score alone cannot show the difference.

Directories with a free route and what each one asks

Directories are the kind of free backlink site where the free link is most often followed, and the price sits in the terms of the free route. For free backlink directory submission sites that ask nothing of your site, the free table in our directory list holds them. The 10 below are directories in our catalog, DR 43 to 83, whose free route asks for something, with that condition and what their live listings link like.

Read down the last column and a pattern shows. Where a directory checks its badge, the nofollow listings belong to sites without it: DailyPings' 6 and EasyLaunch's 14 all sat on sites showing no badge. The free link is real, and it lasts exactly as long as the condition does.

At SubmitMySaas the free route is also the followed one, and it is rationed. Its free card reads "Free links are followed while your homepage badge is verified" and offers 10 "free slots available each week"; its FAQ settles the paid side: "Links included in paid launches, sponsorships, and product features are marked as sponsored." So the free link there costs a badge plus a place in a short weekly line. Uneed (DR 76) charges in time: its free line puts your date "at the back of the line" and wants "An upvote score of 10 to stay published, 20 for the do-follow backlink". Uneed also closes that line when submissions pile up; through Submitator you can always launch there.

Every directory in that table is one we file to. Whatever a free route wants on your site, a badge or a link back, we put there and keep there, so where a badge is the condition the followed link comes without the upkeep, however many of your directories ask for one. We look at whether a badge reads as a link swap in Google's eyes in another post, and a third sorts the kinds of free by their real price.

Article platforms: a free link inside something you wrote

An article platform gives you a free link inside your own writing, which makes it the most work per link and, on DEV, one of the most dependable. On 28 October 2026 the bodies of the 28 newest articles on DEV carried 107 outbound links, and every one was followed, on pages with no noindex. Our guide to it counted 202 of 212 followed in September. DEV reads DR 91 on our checker, and its content policy is the price: its terms ask for content that "is not designed primarily for the purposes of promotion or creating backlinks", and the ten nofollow links the guide found all sat in one self-promoting post.

Hashnode works differently. Every link written inside an article body carries ugc: across the 72 articles in our guide and again on a Hashnode blog read on 28 October 2026. What Hashnode offers instead is a blog that can live on your own domain with its Pro plan, at $5 a month, where the article builds your own site rather than linking to it.

Medium and Quora pages rank for free backlink searches themselves. Read the rel on your own post there before you count it as a backlink; checking the rel in your browser is a short walk-through. Guest posts and article submission sites trade the same thing on someone else's terms: an article for a link.

Communities and launch sites: Hacker News, Product Hunt and Indie Hackers

Communities and launch sites send visitors the day you post, and their links mostly ask not to be counted as backlinks. Product Hunt tagged the Visit website link ugc on all 17 product pages our guide read in October. Indie Hackers links to your site from three places on a product page, all three nofollow, and 32 of the 78 product pages in our guide's sample carried a noindex as well.

Hacker News is the one that changes its mind. A new story's link is nofollow, and Hacker News publishes no rule for when that ends; its own pages show the nofollow coming off once readers vote a story past about twenty points. On 28 October 2026 its Show HN page held 30 stories linking off the site: all 7 above twenty points were followed, and 21 of the 23 below it were nofollow. The median Show HN in our guide's sample scored two points, so plan on the visit rather than the link.

Reddit threads rank for free backlink searches too, and the advice for Medium holds there: read the rel on your own post before you count it. Post in all of them for the conversation and the launch-day traffic; most of the followed links on this page come from the other groups.

Profile backlinks: free, and rarely followed

Profile backlinks are the website field on an account page, and free backlinks lists often carry a long block of them, sometimes sold as a high DA profile backlinks sites list. The domains are as strong as domains get: GitHub and Gravatar both read DR 97 on our checker. The links are not. On 28 October 2026 a GitHub profile marked its website field nofollow me, a repository's website link and the links in its README carried nofollow, Gravatar's profile link read me nofollow noreferrer and on DEV the website field carried ugc on all 11 profiles that showed one among the authors of its newest articles.

The me in those values is an identity claim: it says the profile and the site belong to the same person, which is how Mastodon, for one, verifies a website. It does not cancel the nofollow beside it. Fill the profiles in for what they do well (a page that can rank for your name, a visible link between your accounts and your site) and look for followed links elsewhere.

Free dofollow backlinks: which free sites pass a followed link

Put the reads together and the honest answer is a short list. On our reads, free dofollow backlinks come from two places: the body of a DEV article and a listing on a directory whose free route is followed, on that directory's terms. Hacker News adds one more once readers vote a story past about twenty points. Almost every profile field, launch page, Hashnode body and community post we read tags your link nofollow or ugc, so a free dofollow backlinks list built from them is a list of links that ask not to be counted.

Best free dofollow backlinks, by what each one asks

• A DEV article (DR 91): something its readers want, with links that serve them.
• A directory that asks nothing of your site, such as Viberank (DR 52): a sign-in and a 35-character tagline, published as soon as you submit.
• A directory that wants a link back, such as Twelve Tools (DR 83) or Turbo0 (DR 81): the link, left in place for the life of the listing.
• A directory that wants its badge, such as Findly.tools (DR 82) or DailyPings (DR 63): the badge, which DailyPings checks every day.
• A queue with a vote at the end, such as Uneed (DR 76): a launch date it picks and an upvote score of 20 on the day.
• A Hacker News story past about twenty points: readers who care enough to vote.

How to get free dofollow backlinks

Among free dofollow backlink sites, start where the link is most certain and the cost lowest: directories that ask nothing, then the badge and link-back routes, then one DEV article worth reading. You cannot create free dofollow backlinks on a site you do not control; what you can do is meet the terms of the site that does, and keep meeting them. To get free dofollow backlinks at any volume, you sign up for not one badge but dozens, each one a few lines of markup in your repository that every future redesign must carry over. Before you count a link from any free backlinks site, open the live page and read it; a listing is worth what four checks a directory listing has to clear say it is.

Free high DA backlinks: why DA and PA lists mislead

Lists of free high DA backlinks sort their rows by Domain Authority, Moz's score for a whole site, and sometimes by Page Authority, Moz's score for one page. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' score for the same idea, and it is the one our tables print. All three rate the site that would link to you. None of them reads the rel on your link, checks the page's robots tag or asks whether the link reaches your domain.

That is how a high DA free backlinks list can end up led by profile sites: the domains are strong and the field you get on them is nofollow. A followed listing on Viberank, at DR 52, is a backlink in the full sense, while a profile on a DR 97 domain asks search engines to skip the link. So read a free high DA PA backlink offer as a fact about the site, not about your link. Put the site through the Domain Rating checker for the domain half, and what each of the three rel values tells Google covers the link half.

How to get free backlinks for a new website

A new site has no links yet, so the order matters more than the count. Six steps, cheapest first:

1. Tell search engines the site exists. Submitting a new site to Google and Bing comes before any backlink, so the links point at a site a crawler already knows.
2. Fill in the profiles on GitHub, Gravatar, DEV and the rest. Their links are nofollow or ugc, and they still tell visitors and other services who runs the site.
3. List on the free directories that ask nothing, then take the badge and link-back routes. Turbo0's free route asks for an "Ahrefs DR above 10", which a site launched last week usually does not have, so some free routes open later than others.
4. Write one article for DEV that its readers would want anyway, and link your site where it helps them.
5. Launch on Product Hunt and post a Show HN once you have something to show; count the visitors, not the links.
6. Open every live listing and read the link: where it points, what its rel says and whether the page carries a noindex. The link preview checker shows how a directory that scrapes your page will read its title, description and image.

A free backlink generator, or a list of a hundred sites worked through in an afternoon, mostly fills comment and profile fields in bulk, and Google's spam policies name "Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature" among their examples of link spam. The same list names "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as well, which is why every directory on this page comes with its Domain Rating and the rel its live listings carry; what separates a directory people browse from a link farm gets its own post. For the count a new site needs, how many linking sites a new domain usually takes works it out from page one.

What free backlinks cost, and who pays the upkeep

Free backlinks are paid for in three currencies. Time: a queue of weeks or months, a launch day, the hours a form takes. Content: an article, a tagline cut to 35 characters, a description written to each directory's rules. Code: a badge or link back placed on your own site, kept up for the life of the listing. The last one costs the most, because it never ends: the day a rebuilt footer drops the badge, every link that depended on it goes too.

Free SEO backlinks that last are the ones somebody keeps the condition on. With Submitator, that somebody is us. You decide which directories, reading each one's Domain Rating in the dashboard, and the work after that is ours. Each directory's description is written fresh for it, within its length limits, and every badge and link back your choices call for runs through one Submitator component you add to your site. We keep each of them up, and a directory added later never asks for a change to your code. The kit you would otherwise prepare yourself shows what that saves.

Most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours, every directory within 21 days at most. If a directory rejects a submission, by default you get one more directory to pick, on every plan except All Directories, whose selection is already the whole catalog. A refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms. Starter, Growth and Scale each include free indexing by IndexMachine ($25 value). We catalog a directory after a submission there has gone through from start to finish.

Every plan is paid once: 30 directories for $29, 60 for $49, 100 for $79 and All Directories at $149 for everything in the catalog now and later. The catalog table prints all 160+ with DR, link type and badge rule; SaaS directories and AI tool directories sort the same rows by what you are listing. Comparing services first? Start from our ranking of the paid alternatives.