Free Backlinks, No Catch: The Directory That Skips the Paywall

The Macro: Backlinks Are Still Expensive and Everyone Knows It

Here’s something that shouldn’t still be true in 2025: getting a basic dofollow backlink from a halfway-credible directory often costs $100 or more. Per listing. And most of those directories were built by SEO consultants who understood the value of the thing they were selling, which means the paywall is load-bearing, not incidental.

The builder community has been quietly furious about this for years.

For indie founders and solo developers shipping side projects, the math gets ugly fast. You need backlinks to build domain authority. You need domain authority to rank. You need to rank to get users. But buying your way into that loop before you have any revenue is just paying for the possibility of traction. It’s a real cost with a probabilistic return, and most early-stage builders don’t have the budget for it.

The directory market itself is surprisingly crowded. Sites like Product Hunt, Betalist, and a long tail of niche launch directories all compete for submissions, and most of them offer nofollow links by default, which search engines treat as suggestions rather than endorsements. The dofollow/nofollow distinction sounds technical but it’s the entire ballgame for SEO purposes. Nofollow links are basically politeness. Dofollow links are actual signal.

High-growth companies reportedly spend around 12% of revenue on marketing, compared to about 5% for no-growth firms, according to MarketingCharts. For companies with revenue, that math pencils out. For companies without it, you’re bootstrapping SEO the same way you’re bootstrapping everything else: slowly, manually, with whatever free tools you can string together.

That gap between “can afford a real SEO budget” and “just launched this thing last week” is exactly where MarketingDB is trying to set up shop.

The Micro: One Listing, One Backlink, No Credit Card

MarketingDB is a free directory where you submit your project and get a dofollow backlink in return. That’s basically the whole pitch. No freemium tier where the free version gives you nofollow and the paid version gives you the real thing. No upsell waiting two screens in. Just a listing.

According to the product description, every submission gets a dofollow backlink, a genuine review, and a permanent listing. The founder, Mohd Anas (per Aura++ community posts), has described it as something he built because he needed it for his own projects first. That origin story is either authentic or very well-crafted, but it does explain the product decisions. This isn’t a monetization-first directory that added a free tier. It’s a free tool that hasn’t figured out monetization yet.

Which, honestly, is the more interesting version.

The site’s current domain rating sits at 21 according to launchdirectories.com, which is low but not nothing for a new property. DR builds over time and the backlinks it offers are only as valuable as the domain itself becomes, so there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing happening here. More quality submissions raise the profile. A higher profile attracts more quality submissions.

According to TrustMRR, current revenue is $0. That’s public information and it’s not a criticism, it’s just context. The product is free, there’s no visible monetization layer, and the team appears to be at earliest stage.

It got solid traction when it launched on Product Hunt, which tells you the builder community is at least curious.

The product is listed as built for “indie builders” who want to share projects and get high-quality backlinks. Whether those backlinks are actually high quality in six months depends almost entirely on how well they curate submissions between now and then.

The Verdict

I genuinely like the premise here. Charging $100 for a backlink from a site with mediocre authority is a grift that the SEO industry has normalized, and someone building the free alternative is doing the lord’s work, or at least doing a useful thing.

The real question is whether MarketingDB can hold its domain quality as it scales. Free submission directories have a well-documented spam problem. Once your DR ticks up, the spam bots find you. If Mohd Anas is manually reviewing every submission right now, that process doesn’t survive a 10x traffic spike without either automation or help. The value proposition collapses pretty fast if the directory fills up with junk.

At 30 days, I’d want to know what the submission volume looks like and whether there’s any curation process in place. At 60 days, I’d want to see whether the DR is moving. At 90 days, I’d want to know if there’s any plan to keep the lights on financially, because “free forever” is a hard promise to keep when hosting and maintenance start adding up.

If they can keep the quality bar high and figure out even a light monetization path (featured listings, maybe, or a paid review tier for people who want it faster), this could be a genuinely useful tool for the exact builders it’s targeting. Right now it’s promising. That’s enough.