Free backlink sites, rated and tracked

What a free backlink is worth

A new domain has no history, and search engines treat no history as no reason to rank. What changes that is other sites linking to it, and the fastest way to have any links at all is to put your own address on every page you are allowed to. That is what this list is: every page a new site can be linked from without asking anybody's permission, from a social profile to a business directory to a launch platform.

Be clear about the ceiling. These links are ones anybody can get, so they carry less weight than a link somebody chose to give you, and search engines know which is which. What they do is take a domain from nothing to something: a profile of 126 links from sites rated 70 and above is a site that exists, where a site with two links is a site that might. They also get the brand name ranking for itself within a week, which is the first search a new product has to win.

The other thing they are worth is time. A link an editor gives you costs a pitch and a wait. Everything on this list costs ten minutes and a logo.

The order to do them in

The tiers on the filter are the plan, and they run in the order the work is done.

1. The profiles first: 56 of them. An account in your name with your address on it, on the platforms that will still be there in ten years. They take ten minutes each, they are the highest rated links on the list, and they are the ones a customer actually finds. Do the ones you would have made anyway on the first day, and the rest over the first week.
2. The directories next: the pages about the product on a list of products. One form each, the same six things pasted in, done in an afternoon. The startup directories page on this site is the short version with notes on each.
3. The launch platforms on a date you pick. These are events with votes, and they reward a page that already has everything above in place: a launch on day one lands on a site with no profiles, no listings and nothing for a visitor to find.
4. The communities on a cadence. The link is in the profile; the posts are what people read, and a post that is only a link is removed. Post when there is something to say.
5. The review sites once there are customers who will write one. Claim the profile early so it is yours, and leave it empty until it is not.
6. The business listings if there is an address: 33 of them, mostly local directories that quote your name, address and phone number, which is what a maps result is built from. For a software product with no premises they are the last thing to do, and most of them are worth doing anyway for the link.

Tick a row when the link is live, not when the form is sent. Several of these moderate, and a listing in a queue is not a link yet.

Why the profiles come first

The highest rated sites on the list are not directories. They are the platforms everybody uses, and every one of them gives an account a page with a link on it. A company page on LinkedIn, an organisation on GitHub, a channel on YouTube, a profile on Bluesky with the domain set as the handle: each is a link from a site rated in the nineties, and each takes less time than reading this paragraph.

Some of them will never send a visitor. A profile on a fiction site or a 3D printing marketplace is a link and nothing else, and the list says so beside each. They are on the list because the link is real and the page is yours, and a list of free links that skipped the free links to be tasteful would be a shorter list, not a better one. Make the accounts you would have made anyway first, and decide about the rest by how many links you want.

Two rules for every profile. Use the same name, the same mark and the same one-line description on all of them, so that the fifty pages read as one company. And put the full address with the scheme, https and all, in the website field, because a bare domain in a bio is text on some platforms and a link on others.

How the ratings work

The figure beside each site is Ahrefs' Domain Rating, a measure from 0 to 100 of how strong the site's backlink profile is compared with every other site Ahrefs knows, on a logarithmic scale. A site rated 90 is not twice a site rated 45; it is many times over. The figures were read on 7 September 2026 and will drift; the date is on the page so you know how old they are.

It is the one number on this list that is not ours and not the site's. What it says about a link is how much the rest of the web trusts the domain the link is on, which is the nearest thing to a value for the link that anybody publishes. What it does not say is whether the link is followed, whether the page is indexed, or whether anybody reads it, and no list of two hundred sites can promise those for every row.

Work the list from the top. Below a rating of about 30 a link is worth little on its own; below 10 it is worth nothing, and nothing under 5 is on the list.

What was left off, and why

A list of free links is usually padded, and the padding is what gets a site into trouble. Left off on purpose:

• Comment-system profiles and social bookmarking sites. Search engines discounted those a decade ago, and a backlink profile that is mostly them looks like the work of a link seller, because it usually is.
• Article farms and guest post networks that sell a link inside a post. Paid links that are not marked as paid are the one thing on this subject that search engines penalise rather than ignore.
• Anything rated under 5. A link from a site nobody links to is a link from nowhere.
• Sites that no longer take a listing, and the duplicates every circulated spreadsheet of these accumulates. Every row here was checked on the date the ratings were read.

The list keeps the sites whose only value is the link, as long as the link is real and the page is yours. What it does not keep is anything a search engine has a name for.

What gets a link taken down

• A profile with nothing on it but the link. Most platforms remove empty accounts on a schedule; a mark, a description and one post keeps it.
• A community post that is only a link. Reddit, Hacker News, Quora and Dev.to all remove it, and the ones with memories remember the account.
• A directory submission with a description that says what the product is called instead of what it does. Moderated directories reject it, and unmoderated ones bury it.
• A logo that is a screenshot, or a wordmark that is unreadable at 32 pixels. It is the one thing on every form that a moderator looks at first.
• A business listing with an address that is not yours. Local directories check, and the maps listings are the first to be pulled.

The board's own row

The Board is on the list because a list of places to get a link from that left out the one we run would be a stranger list than one that says so. It is marked as ours, it is sorted by its rating like every other row, and the rating is the one Ahrefs gives it, which is low, because the site is new. A listing here is a paid placement and the link on it goes through a redirect, so it is on the list as a place to be seen, not as a free link: what it offers that the rest of the list does not is a position with a public price and a public count of the impressions and clicks it has earned, from a dollar.

Questions people ask about a free backlink site

More free tools

All of them are on the free tools page. Every one is free, asks for no account, and stores nothing of yours on our side. A listing on The Board is a logo, a line and a link, from $1, and every number on the board is public.