Free backlink sources for Canadian businesses, tiered by how much they're worth

A Reel by Matt Diamante (@heytony.agency) has been doing well this month: the hook is “Wait… you can get backlinks for free?”, then a screen recording of a Google Sheet — 50+ US backlink sources, tiered by how much each one is worth, with a Make a Copy button. It tags @harrysandersseo and points at a free resource from Hawk Academy. Roughly 670 likes against 2,000 comments, which is usually the tell that the real call to action is “comment LEARN” into a DM funnel, not the sheet itself.

Nobody had built the Canadian version. So we checked one — against the sources themselves, not against what the format implies.

Why the format works, and where “free” gets oversold

Four things make the original land: it opens on a real pain point (backlinks cost money), it hands over something tangible instead of a lecture (a sheet, not an explainer), it leans on authority stacking (a .gov citation reads as trustworthy in a way a blog comment never will), and the engagement math is doing real work — 2,000 comments on 670 likes only happens when the ask is “comment a word,” not “click a link.”

The oversold part is the word “backlink.” A link tagged nofollow — an instruction, invented in 2005 to fight spam, that tells Google not to pass ranking credit through it — is what most of the sources below actually give you. That doesn’t make them worthless. A registration on a .gov or .gc.ca domain is a citation: a public record that your business exists, verified by an institution, readable by a person and increasingly by the AI systems that summarize the web before anyone clicks through. That’s real. It is not the same claim as “this will move your rankings,” and neither this post nor the Reel it’s answering should be read as making that claim.

The other honest caveat: registering a business purely to harvest the citation is exactly what these portals are built to catch. Every source below assumes you’re a real, operating business submitting your own listing — not a shell registered for the link.

Where the US playbook doesn’t map onto Canada

SAM.gov, the US federal registry the original Reel leads with, has a public entity search that shows a registered business’s basic details with no login required. We could not confirm the same is true of Canada’s equivalents. CanadaBuys, BC Bid, Ontario’s Tenders Portal and Alberta Purchasing Connection are all free and genuine to register on — but as far as we could verify, supplier information sits inside a portal account rather than behind a public, crawlable directory page the way SAM.gov’s does. If that’s wrong for a specific portal, we’d rather hear about it and fix this post than leave a guess standing. Either way, what’s confirmed is the citation and the verified-supplier status — not a guaranteed public backlink.

The list, tiered by leverage

Same structure as the source: roughly government first, general directories next, then paid-membership associations, then the startup and software directories that aren’t Canada-specific but are still worth doing. “Verified” below means we confirmed the URL is live and the process matches what’s described — not that we registered a business to test it end to end.

Tier 1 — Government & procurement

Highest trust, mostly nofollow, and the one tier where a wrong claim about a stranger’s registration would be a real accusation — so this is the most carefully hedged of the four.

• CanadaBuys (federal) — canadabuys.canada.ca. Register as a supplier through SAP Ariba; needs a CRA business number and produces a permanent Procurement Business Number. Verified: free, live, registration process confirmed.
• Ontario Tenders Portal — ontariotenders.app.jaggaer.com. Free registration, under 5 minutes; also gets you bid notifications if you sell into Ontario’s public sector. Verified: free, live.
• BC Bid — bcbid.gov.bc.ca. Free to browse; registering needs a BCeID. Verified: free, live.
• Alberta Purchasing Connection — purchasing.alberta.ca. Free vendor account; mandatory only if you plan to bid, but the profile exists either way. Verified: free, live.
• SEAO (Québec) — seao.gouv.qc.ca. Not free like the other four: the supplier directory sits behind a paid subscription (roughly $3–$7/month per role) or a $30-per-tender fee. Included because it’s the only route into Québec’s public sector — not because it fits this post’s “free” framing. Flagged, not verified as free.

Tier 2 — General directories & citations

The local-SEO foundation. None of these move rankings on their own in 2026 — see below for why they still matter.

• Yellow Pages Canada (YP.ca) — yp.ca. Free listing under “Advertisers” on the homepage; goes through manual review before it appears. Verified: free, live.
• Bing Places for Business — bingplaces.com. Free, roughly 15 minutes; imports from an existing Google Business Profile if you have one. Also feeds the index behind Copilot and some AI answers. Verified: free, live.
• BBB (Better Business Bureau) — bbb.org. Free basic profile; search for your business and claim it, or create one. Paid accreditation adds the badge and placement — the base listing doesn’t cost anything. Verified: free, live.
• Yelp for Business — biz.yelp.com/claim. Free to claim or add; verified by phone or email. Verified: free, live.
• Apple Business Connect — businessconnect.apple.com. Free; controls how a business appears in Apple Maps, Wallet and Siri. Verified: free, live.

Tier 3 — Chambers & associations

The one tier where the honest answer is: this isn’t free. Every Canadian city has a chamber of commerce or board of trade with a member directory, and membership is what tier 3 of the source Reel is describing — but Canadian chamber membership is paid, and the range is wide: the Calgary Chamber starts near $50/year at its smallest tier, while an individual Toronto Region Board of Trade membership runs into the hundreds. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s own national directory only lists members of an affiliated local chamber, so there’s no free way into it. Worth doing if you were joining a chamber anyway for the networking — not worth joining purely for the link.

• Canadian Chamber of Commerce network directory — chamber.ca. National directory, reached only via a local chamber; paid.
• Find your local chamber — canada.chamberofcommerce.com/chambers. A directory of the directories; free to search, the listing itself needs paid membership in whichever chamber you join.

Tier 4 — Startup, software & agency directories

Not Canada-specific — the source Reel’s own final tier is the same three names — but genuinely free, and worth doing regardless of where the business is based. Two Canadian-only startup directories exist too; we’ve flagged those as unverified rather than guess at their submission process.

• Clutch — clutch.co/get-listed. Free Basic profile in about 10 minutes; it only becomes publicly visible once you have 3 client reviews. Verified: free, live; public visibility gated on reviews.
• G2 — sell.g2.com/create-a-profile. Free to claim and to receive reviews; verification takes 3–5 business days. Verified: free, live.
• GetApp — getapp.com (part of Gartner Digital Markets; one listing also reaches Capterra and Software Advice). Free product listing, but only for prepackaged B2B software — not agencies or custom builds. Verified: free, live, software only.
• AlternativeTo — alternativeto.net. Free software listing; new accounts need to be 7 days old before they can submit. Verified: free, live, software only.
• Product Hunt — producthunt.com. Free to submit; the account also needs to be a week old. Less an ongoing directory than a one-day traffic and citation spike — the listing itself stays up after. Verified: free, live.
• ByCanada.Tech — bycanada.tech. A Canada-specific startup directory, 10,000+ listed. Unverified: we could not confirm the submission process or cost without an account.
• Startup List Canada — startuplist.ca. Same caveat as above — exists, appears free, submission mechanics unconfirmed. Unverified.

Why the small ones matter, even nofollowed

A single directory listing doesn’t move a ranking by itself in 2026 — that much of the original Reel’s on-screen caption is right. What actually shows up in local and AI-driven search is consistency: the same business name, address and phone number appearing the same way across a dozen of these sources is a signal that the business is real and stable; the same details drifting between a directory and the website is a small, quiet negative one. The value of tier 2 isn’t any single link — it’s having a matching footprint for something else to cross-check against.

What this is, and isn’t

This is a checked list of where the sources go and how each submission works — nothing more. We have no client results to report yet, and the site says so on purpose; nothing above is a claim that a listing here moved anyone’s rankings, ours or a client’s. Two rows are flagged unverified rather than guessed at, and if a “verified” row above has changed its process by the time you read this — sources like these drift — tell us and we’ll fix the post rather than leave a stale claim standing.

If keeping a list like this current, and doing the actual submissions, is work you’d rather hand off, that’s what our Content & SEO work covers. Get in touch and we’ll tell you honestly what’s worth your time.