A Gratis Linkbuilding alternative, starting from the €0 invoice

Most bills start with a total. This one starts with a headline: "Gratis Linkbuilding – Bouw Waardevolle Backlinks", and underneath it four tiles, the first of which reads "100% Gratis: Geen link terug vereist." An autopsy begins by taking that line seriously. For the directory itself, it holds. The listing form has three fields (link name, link address, category), asks for no account and charges nothing.

What the tile does not itemise is the other currency. The rules page spells out two paths. Place a reciprocal link to the homepage or to the category page and the system finds it on the URL you gave and "wordt jouw link direct geplaatst". Skip the reciprocal link and you join a queue, which the site describes as lasting "een tijdje" because capacity for free requests is limited. No turnaround is published.

So the real invoice has two columns, money and attention, and the €0 sits only in the first. A reciprocal link costs a placement on your own site; the queue costs waiting time. Both are worth pricing before you compare this with anything else.

Here is what one free placement buys, using only what the site states:

• One permanent dofollow keyword link, shown on the category page and on the homepage.
• A second, image link per entry, which the homepage promises as "Dubbele Exposure". We could not confirm it on the category page we read, where the listings showed as text links.
• Acceptance limited to Dutch and Belgian sites. Adult, dating and gambling sites are excluded, and the rules say they are removed.
• One listing per site. Multiple different sites can be submitted with no account.

The homepage we fetched carried 244 outbound directory links to 235 distinct hosts, 202 of them .nl. In the HTML, 244 links carry rel="noopener" only, and 2 carry nofollow, so the "dofollow" claim matches the markup. A listing therefore shares the homepage with a few hundred other sites, and the category page is where it stands out. The site publishes no traffic figure, so we cannot put a value on that. It is a modest asset and it costs €0.

The upsell lives on the operator's site, targetvision.nl, under "Eenmalige betaling voor permanente links – geen jaarlijkse kosten". All three prices are listed as excluding VAT. Dividing price by listings gives a per-link figure the page itself does not show:

Check the arithmetic: 99 ÷ 5 = 19.80; 179 ÷ 10 = 17.90; 249 ÷ 20 = 12.45. At the standard Dutch VAT rate of 21%, Zilver is 179 × 1.21 = €216.59 for a business that cannot reclaim it. Each package lists permanent placement, unique A, B and C-class IP addresses and a full link report. The gratislinkbuilding.com homepage states delivery as "Binnen 1 week (brons) tot 1 maand (goud)".

The second price list is built around written articles. Prices were read on the fetch date and are one-time ("Eenmalig"); the page does not say whether VAT is included. The pages also show struck-through list prices, which we ignore because discounts are perishable.

Counting every bullet as a link flatters the unit price, because an article and its homepage blog link may be one placement seen twice. If you count only the articles plus the directory links, Brons is 299 ÷ 9 = €33.22 per placement. Both readings are fair; the page does not say which one the operator intends. Every tier promises a donor with "Domain Authority 15+, Trust Flow 7+" and a maximum of 15 outbound links on the homepage. Those are third-party metrics, and which sites carry the links is not published.

The following is a made-up scenario, not a real customer. A Dutch webshop with one domain wants to add links during a single month. We price three ways to do it, using only the numbers above.

The jump from A to B is €179 for ten listings. The jump from B to C is €220 more for a different type of placement: written articles plus homepage blog links. Neither tells you in advance which domains will carry the links. That is the gap the next section addresses.

A bill like this ends with a delivery report, and the package pages promise one ("volledige link rapportage"). An independent check is a separate line item, and here is the one we can supply. Take the shop in month B and say the operator hands over ten donor domains. Using our API:

• 10 × domain lookups for donor DR and referring-domain counts: free, no key.
• 10 × backlinks calls filtered by source domain, to see whether the link has appeared in crawl data: 10 × 2 credits = 20 credits.
• 4 weekly refdomains calls on the shop's own domain: 4 × 2 = 8 credits.

Total: 28 credits, at $0.0001 each, which is $0.0028. The starter balance is $100 (1,000,000 credits). The limit is freshness. Our index is built from our own web data on roughly a monthly cadence, so a link placed this week may take weeks to show. Treat a missing link as "not yet seen" first and "not delivered" only after a couple of cycles. The API reference lists every filter, including minimum donor DR and date range.

The profile in the data story is also a prediction. A shop listed here would join a neighbourhood where 54 of 75 referring domains are .nl and 10 are .be, which is exactly the geography the directory sells. The anchor mix shows what other sites do with the name, not what a listed site gets. Your own anchor is whatever you typed into the form's "Link name" field.

One detail is practical. The most-linked pages are the old addresses: http://www.gratislinkbuilding.com/ alone holds 63 backlinks. If you place a reciprocal link, point it at the current address, https://gratislinkbuilding.com/, so the checker does not follow a redirect. And note that 7 of the 10 nofollow-only donors are start-page style sites (judged by domain name only), so "dofollow" in the sales copy describes this directory's outgoing links, not every link around it.

If you are comparing sellers, the same query works on any other domain. Our pages on another seller and a second one apply the same method.

Several lines on this autopsy favour the brand, and they are not small:

• It is a place to put a link. We are a data service. We do not place, sell or index anything. If the job is "get a Dutch .nl site onto some directories this week", we cannot do it and they can.
• The free tier is the product. No account, no card, no trial clock. For a new Dutch or Belgian site the cost of testing the directory is one form submission.
• Local focus. The directory accepts only Dutch and Belgian sites, and 202 of the 235 hosts on its homepage are .nl. Your neighbours match your market, which a global crawl cannot arrange for you.
• Fixed one-time prices. Both package lists say "Eenmalig". There is no monthly seat, and the directory packages are explicitly free of yearly fees.
• A human on the other end. Writing articles and managing the host sites are services, and they sit outside what an API provides.

If you want that outcome, stay. Our data is the second step: the way to check afterwards that what was placed is visible, and to tell your own listing from the next one.

An honest autopsy lists what it could not price. For Gratis Linkbuilding: how long the approval queue takes, whether a listing can ever be removed or expires, how many entries the directory holds, and its traffic. None is published. The site does not state a legal entity, a founding year or a team, and the only named person appears on the operator's own site, not here. Prices on linkbuildingspecialisten.nl are "geen standaard pakketten", so the niche link line stays empty.

For us the blank lines are the reverse. We have no new-and-lost link report, no alerts, no spam score and no historical charts. Our DR is a number from our own graph and will not match another tool's. If your reporting needs those, a dashboard product fits better than our JSON. For link-tool context across the market, see the link-building tools hub.