Profile Creation Sites for SEO: What Works and What Is a Waste

By Pankaj Singh, founder of Doon Digital. Published September 12, 2026.

Most articles about profile creation sites are a list and nothing else. Two hundred names, a Domain Authority column nobody checked, and a promise that submitting to all of them will lift your rankings. Ours is different for one reason: in August and September 2026 we built 48 profile backlinks to our own site, tracked every one, and measured what actually happened. Some were worth the time. Eight of them were literally invisible to Google. This is what we learned, and the full 220-site list is at the end, free and ungated.

What a profile backlink is, and what it is not

A profile backlink is the link you get when you create an account somewhere and fill in the website field. GitHub, Quora, a forum, a company directory, a design portfolio. You are not publishing content. You are claiming a space and pointing it back at yourself.

What it is not is a vote. The mental model most people carry, that every link is a small endorsement passing authority, does not apply here. Almost nobody at these platforms reviewed your site before that link went live. You typed a URL into a form. Google knows that, and prices it accordingly.

That does not make profile creation sites worthless. It makes them worth something other than what people expect, which is a more useful thing to understand than a longer list.

The nofollow reality

Why almost every profile link is nofollow by default

The rel="nofollow" attribute exists because platforms that let anyone add a link had a spam problem. Any site with an open signup form and a website field will eventually be found by people submitting at scale, so the platforms stopped passing link equity through those fields. Not selectively, and not as a judgement about you. Across the board.

Of the 48 profile links we built, the overwhelming majority were nofollow, including every one of the high-authority platforms people chase: GitHub, addons.mozilla.org, DigitalOcean, Dailymotion, Slides.com, Minecraft Forum, city-data. If you are picking profile creation sites by Domain Authority in the hope of a strong follow link, the highest-DA options are the ones most certain to be nofollow, because they are the ones that got spammed first.

What nofollow profiles still do

Three things, and they are real.

They build a brand entity. Google and AI systems both try to work out whether a business is a coherent, real thing. Consistent profiles across platforms, with the same name, the same description and the same URL, are part of how that gets established. This has nothing to do with PageRank and it still matters.

They get read by AI answer engines. This one has grown fast. Our own tracking shows this site appearing in roughly 35 percent of sampled ChatGPT responses against 3 percent of Google AI Overviews. That gap is not an accident. ChatGPT draws on the broad web corpus, where profile and platform pages sit, while Google's AI surfaces are grounded in Google's own ranking, where we are not yet strong. Profiles are a large part of why the first number is what it is.

They get a new page crawled quickly. A link from a frequently-crawled platform is one of the fastest ways to get a brand-new URL discovered. Useful once, on launch. Not a strategy.

What we found across 48 profile submissions

The eight that were worth exactly nothing

The clearest waste in the whole batch was a pattern we did not expect. Eight of the 48 were member profiles on small business websites running Wix: a roofing company, a cattery, an off-road tour operator, a few others. The URLs all follow the same shape, /profile/support#####/profile.

These are member accounts on somebody else's small business site. They are noindex by default, they have no audience, and nobody will ever see them. Eight links, roughly two and a half hours of work between them, and not one is visible to a search engine. If a profile creation sites list hands you a batch of unrelated small business domains with member area URLs, that is what you are looking at.

A similar problem sits with public pad and note services. HedgeDoc and CodiMD instances, the ones with /s/ URLs, are frequently either noindex or excluded from crawling. Ten of our links landed there.

The ones that did something

The genuinely useful profiles fell into one group: real platforms with real audiences, where the profile page is a legitimate part of the site rather than an afterthought. GitHub, Quora, Slides.com, Blender Community, DigitalOcean's community, Minecraft Forum, Diigo, city-data. Nofollow, all of them, and still the ones we would build again, because they are indexed, they get crawled often, and they feed the brand-entity and AI-citation effects above.

The honest headline

Here is the number that matters. Across the full 293-link programme those 48 profiles were part of, spanning 15 days, not one keyword changed position. Search Console impressions tripled for three days and returned to baseline within 24 hours. That is a crawl surge, not a ranking gain.

We published that finding rather than the three-day spike, because the spike is what most agencies would have put in the monthly report.

Six checks before you create a profile

Twenty minutes each is the real cost. Two hundred profiles is roughly a working fortnight. Spend it on the ones that pass these.

Is the profile page indexable? Open a completed profile belonging to somebody else on that site and search Google for its exact URL. If Google does not have it, yours will not be found either. This single check would have saved us those eight Wix profiles.

Does the site have an actual audience? Not Domain Authority, audience. A platform where real people read things can send you a visitor. A directory that exists purely to host profiles cannot.

Can you complete the profile properly? A page with your name, a real description, a logo and one link reads as a genuine presence. A page with nothing but a URL reads as what it is.

Does your name, address and phone match your website exactly? This matters more than the link. Inconsistent business details across the web actively suppress local ranking. We learned this expensively: when our office moved in August 2026, 42 existing listings became wrong overnight, and correcting them mattered more than adding new ones.

Is the platform relevant to you in any way? A digital marketing agency on a Blender community has a thin but real justification. On a cattery members page it has none.

Would you link to this page yourself? The most reliable test there is. If you would not send a client to it, its opinion of you carries no weight with Google either.

Do not chase the Domain Authority numbers

One more thing, because it affects every list you will read including the ones we publish.

The Domain Authority figures that travel with profile creation site lists are largely fiction. They get copied from list to list for years without anyone re-checking. When we ran our own Moz checks across 6,375 domains for these resources, we found domains routinely listed at DA 70 or above that do not appear anywhere in the global top million sites. A DA 70 site nobody visits is not a DA 70 site.

Worse, DA cannot tell you the one thing you most need to know, which is whether the service still exists. Moz will happily report a healthy score for platforms that shut down years ago, because the score is computed from a link graph that still remembers them. That is why every entry on our lists carries the date we last saw the page load, and why we show a dash instead of a guess where we have not run a check.

The 220-site list

Our profile creation sites list carries 220 sites, every URL opened and confirmed loading, with real Moz Domain Authority, Page Authority and Spam Score from our own bulk checks rather than copied figures. Dead and parked domains were removed instead of being passed along.

Use it the way the evidence supports. Pick fifteen or twenty platforms that pass the six checks above, complete each profile properly, keep your business details identical everywhere, and then stop. The marginal value of profile number 150 is not lower than profile number 20. It is zero, and if the batch shares an obvious footprint it can be worse than zero.

If you want the thing that does move rankings, it is a small number of genuinely earned editorial links, which is slower, harder and the reason most people do profile creation instead. That is what off-page SEO is actually for, and we wrote up what the rest of the 293 links did across every category. None of it is flattering.

FAQ

Do profile creation sites still work for SEO in 2026? Not the way people expect. They pass almost no link equity because nearly all are nofollow. They do build brand consistency, get read by AI answer engines, and speed up first crawl of a new page. Judge them on that, not on rankings.

How many profile creation sites should I submit to? Fifteen to twenty good ones, completed properly. We built 48 and measured no ranking change. Volume is not the variable.

Are nofollow profile links worthless? No, but they are worthless for PageRank. Their value is brand entity, AI citation and indexation. Our site appears in about 35 percent of sampled ChatGPT answers, and profiles are part of why.

What are high DA PA profile creation sites? Sites with high Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority scores. Treat the claim sceptically: many domains advertised at DA 70 plus on these lists are not in the global top million. Check the figure yourself, and check the site still loads.

Can profile creation sites hurt my rankings? They can, in two ways. If dozens of the domains share one piece of software and one URL pattern, they read as a single manipulated source rather than many. And pointing an exact-match commercial phrase at a profile page is a clear manipulation signal that a low-authority site has no buffer to absorb.

What should I do instead? Fix what a crawl of your own site tells you, get your business details consistent everywhere, claim your Google Business Profile properly, and then earn a small number of real editorial links each month. Less satisfying to count, and it is the part that works.

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Doon Digital is an SEO company in Dehradun working across Uttarakhand since 2019. We publish our own results, including the ones that did not work.