I measured 20 "free dofollow" backlink sites. One of them was real.

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.

Exactly one of them gives a free user a followed, indexable link.

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.

The script