I Checked the rel Attribute on 20 Platforms. Most "Backlinks" Pass Nothing

A day of curl, a browser console, and several lists that turned out to be wrong

I spent two days trying to get real backlinks for a side project. Not buying them, not spamming forums — the legitimate stuff: publish an article, submit to a directory, list the product somewhere.

Before committing to each one, I checked what HTML the platform actually emits for an outbound link. That check took about thirty seconds per site and saved me most of a week, because the majority of "great dofollow backlink sources" recommended in 2026 blog posts emit rel="nofollow".

Here is the whole table, and the method, so you can run it yourself instead of trusting anyone's list — including mine.

The check

For most sites, curl is enough:

curl -sS -L "https://platform.com/some-page" | grep -o '<a [^>]*yourdomain[^>]*>'

If the tag comes back with only noopener and/or noreferrer, the link is dofollow...

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