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A Growing List of Free Do-follow Backlinks

4 min readMay 23, 2025

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Photo by Alan Hardman on Unsplash

I was super excited yesterday when I discovered a massive list of 3,000+ foundational backlinks. That could really give my websites a nice ranking boost.

I’ve seen these lists before, but they typically listed the obvious websites. Yellow Pages, Foursquare, etc.

Surely this list of 3,000 links would have some hidden gems in there. And it did — but overall the list was a massive disappointment and waste of time.

I quickly discovered that many of the websites linked in the Google sheet were old, expired domains. And then some links that did work had no place to create a profile and link to your website.

It got even worse.

The websites promising a do-follow link were actually a no-follow link.

I made the mistake of assuming someone had verified the link type. Instead, whoever created the list likely copied it from someone else, who copied it from someone else, and so on.

No one’s going to click through 100s of links and inspect them all for a no-follow tag.

Well — that’s exactly what I did and why I’m writing this article for you.

No-follow links can help a tiny bit if your website is brand new, but they don’t pass on any authority to your domain. I found a few tagged UGC…

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Nick Nolan
Nick Nolan

Written by Nick Nolan

Freelance marketing consultant | Writing about Copywriting, SEO, and Social Media

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