Last week I almost signed a $1,250 contract for something I didn’t understand.
I’m a solo founder. I’ve been writing code for 25 years. I can debug a race condition in a distributed system, architect a multi-tenant SaaS from scratch, and ship four products in parallel.
But I didn’t know what “dofollow” meant.
The Pitch
It started with a LinkedIn message.
“Hey, I checked your site. Domain Rating 9. That’s below the threshold agencies care about. But I can fix it — DR30+ in 6 months for $700–1,250, depending on the package.”
I felt the sting immediately. DR9? That sounds bad. The way he said “below the threshold agencies care about” hit exactly right. He knew what he was doing.
He followed up with a menu:
DR Full Package: a 6–7 week project, $700–1,250 total (placement only, or full management with content writing)
Sponsored content potential: once you hit DR30+, you can charge $100–300 per article — a future revenue stream
And a kicker: “I can introduce you to clients once your DR is high enough. But we need to build the foundation first.”
Classic. Pay first, get value later.
I almost said yes.
The Doubt
Here’s the embarrassing part: I didn’t actually know what DR meant.
I’d seen “DR” and “DA” thrown around in indie hacker communities. I knew vaguely that it had something to do with SEO. But I’d spent 25 years on the engineering side — compilers, databases, distributed systems — and zero time thinking about backlinks.
So before replying, I did what any engineer would do.
I started investigating.
The Investigation
First: what is DR?
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ score for how authoritative your domain is, based on how many quality sites link to you. It’s logarithmic — going from DR9 to DR30 is a much bigger jump than the numbers suggest.
Second: what’s a “dofollow” link?
This is where it got interesting.
There are two kinds of links on the web:
rel="dofollow" (or just a plain ) — passes "link juice," signals to search engines that the source vouches for the destination
rel="nofollow" — explicitly says "don't pass authority here"
For DR purposes, only dofollow links matter.
So I started auditing every directory I’d ever submitted to, looking for whether the link they gave me was actually worth anything.
I found traps everywhere.
Trap 1: rel=”nofollow”
Several high-DR directories listed me beautifully — and then stuck rel="nofollow" on every outbound link. The listing looks real. The link does nothing.
Trap 2: /aff/ redirect chains
Some directories route all their links through /aff/something?url=yoursite. This is an affiliate redirect chain. Search engines see the redirect, not the destination. No DR value.
Trap 3: elements
A few sites built their "visit site" action as a in a form, not an tag at all. You can't follow a button. Search engines can't either. Zero backlink value.
Trap 4: dofollow sold separately
Some directories offer a free listing (nofollow) and charge $79–99/year for the dofollow upgrade. They specifically build the product around monetizing the link itself.
Trap 5: API keys or secrets requested
One submission form asked for my Stripe restricted key. I had to stop and think.
I won’t pretend “always skip” is the right rule, because it isn’t. Established communities like Indie Hackers also ask for read-only keys to verify revenue, and I registered there. Reputation matters, and so does the scope of what’s being asked for.
The actual rule I landed on: judge by the site’s reputation and the permission scope of the key requested. An unknown directory asking for a live secret key? Skip immediately. A well-known community asking for a read-only restricted key? Evaluate the use case and decide.
When I finished writing this checklist, I opened my own site footer.
There Were 12
I counted. Twelve badges.
Download the Medium app
Not “without realizing it.” Every one of them was the result of me grinding through directory submissions during the chaos of launch week. I just hadn’t kept count, because the weeks around launch were brutal and I was running on fumes.
I checked each one.
Every. Single. One. was dofollow.
It wasn’t because I had a strategy. I’d just instinctively avoided the sites that felt off — the ones with too many ads, the ones that asked for weird things, the ones where the link looked wrong in the inspector. Twenty-five years of engineering had given me a pattern-matching instinct I didn’t know I was applying to SEO.
DR9 isn’t random. It’s twelve dofollow links from real directories, accumulated through six weeks of hand-to-hand work.
According to Ahrefs’ logarithmic scale, with five or six more high-DR listings — AlternativeTo (DR85), Alternative.me (DR74), Future Tools (DR69) — I’m looking at DR15–18 within a couple months. No paid campaign required.
The Decline
I wrote back.
“I appreciate the detailed breakdown. After digging into DR myself, I think I’m further along than I realized — I’ve got 12 dofollow listings already and a clear path to 15+ high-DR directories without paid placement. Budget-wise, I’d rather invest into product and content for now.”
He was gracious about it. No hard sell.
But I noticed something across the exchange: the “I’ll introduce you to clients” hook that appeared in the first message had quietly disappeared by the last one. The real product being sold was the DR service itself. The client introduction was the door-opener.
Knowing that made the whole conversation make sense.
One Thing Worth Saying
If you’re a solo technical founder who has been building in public for more than a month, you’re probably already doing more SEO work than you think.
Every product directory you submitted to. Every badge you added to your footer. Every “Featured on X” you put in your README. If you did the basic research — if you checked the link, if you skipped the sketchy ones — you’ve been building DR without realizing it.
The people who sell DR campaigns are selling the value of systematic application of what you may already be doing intuitively.
That’s worth something. But it’s not worth four figures when you can learn the five rules in an afternoon and do it yourself.
My checklist, for free:
Check for rel="nofollow" in the page source — if it's there, skip
Check if the link goes through /aff/ or similar redirect — if yes, skip
Check if “visit site” is a element — if yes, skip
Check if free listing gets nofollow and dofollow is paid separately — if yes, skip unless the DR is exceptional
If the site asks for API keys or secrets — judge by reputation and scope. Unknown site + live secret key = skip. Established community + read-only restricted key = evaluate the use case.
Six Months From Now
I’m at DR9 today. My rough projection:
AlternativeTo (DR85): +2–3 DR
Alternative.me (DR74): +1–2 DR
Future Tools (DR69): +1 DR
Dang AI (DR80, listed pending): +1–2 DR
3–4 more from my remaining list
Conservative estimate: DR15–18 by October. Without spending four figures.
Will I eventually pay for sponsored content? Probably, once I’m at DR40+ and the math makes sense for mutual value. But I’ll do it as a content partnership, not as a “please give me a backlink” transaction.
I almost paid $1,250 to learn a word.
Turns out “dofollow” is free.
I’m building OriginBrief — a continuous research platform that monitors primary sources and generates weekly intelligence reports. Follow along: originbrief.app
Previous posts in this series:
I Launched My SaaS on Product Hunt. A Week Later, I Still Have Zero Users.
Why I Stopped Reading the News (And Started Reading the Sources)
I’m a 25-Year Engineer Who Never Did Marketing. Here’s What My SaaS Launch Is Teaching Me.
Is Building in Public Overrated? Ask Me Again in a Year.
A note on this story: It’s based on a real exchange with one PR specialist over four days in April 2026. I compressed the timeline and paraphrased some messages and the menu of services to make it readable as a single narrative. The dofollow audit, the 12 footer badges, the five rules (including the nuance about Indie Hackers and other reputable exceptions), and the actual decision to walk away are all real.
Top comments (0)