Which Startup Directories Actually Give Dofollow Links (We Checked All 51)

Search for "startup directories with dofollow links" and you get the same article fifteen times. A table of forty names, a column headed "Dofollow?", and a row of green ticks that nobody appears to have checked. Some of those ticks were true in 2023. Some were never true. A directory can change its link policy in an afternoon by adding nine characters to a template, and no listicle notices.

So we checked. Not by reading each site's marketing page, which is where most of these claims come from, but by looking at the markup on a real listing.

How we checked

A script fetched one actual product page on each of 51 directories, found the outbound link pointing at the listed product's own domain, and read the rel attribute off that anchor. That is the only thing that decides whether a link passes authority. Everything else — a "dofollow backlink" bullet in the pricing table, a claim on someone's blog, a screenshot from last year — is hearsay.

The results, in plain numbers:

• 21 confirmed dofollow. We saw the outbound link and it carried no nofollow or sponsored value.
• 2 confirmed nofollow. We saw the link and it was marked.
• 28 unverified. We did not get to see the link.

That last bucket needs saying clearly, because it is the number a listicle would quietly round away.

"Unverified" does not mean "bad"

Twenty-eight directories returned 403 or 429 to our checker, mostly from Cloudflare's bot protection. That is a statement about our request, not about their links. Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, G2, Capterra, StackShare, Slant, GetApp, Crozdesk, Futurepedia, Toolify, TopAI.tools, There's An AI For That and SaaSworthy all sit in this group. Several of them are worth submitting to for reasons that have nothing to do with links, and some of them very likely are dofollow.

We are not going to guess on their behalf. Guessing is the failure mode we are trying to correct.

The 21 confirmed dofollow directories

Four of these are free with no paid tier at all:

Fifteen have a genuine free route with paid options alongside it. The free route is often slower, queued, or conditional on a badge, which is worth reading carefully before you plan around it:

And two are dofollow but paid only. BetaList charges for submission and refunds if you are rejected. Uneed sells fast-track at $14.99 and skip-the-line at $29.99, and its free queue is currently closed, so treat it as a paid listing today regardless of what older articles say.

The two confirmed nofollow

Indie Hackers and Tekpon mark their outbound links. Both are still reasonable places to be. Indie Hackers sends real readers, and Tekpon is a category site people actually search inside. Neither will move a single ranking through the link itself, and you should plan your time accordingly.

Does a nofollow directory link still have value?

Yes, but not as a ranking signal. A nofollow link can still send qualified traffic, get your product in front of someone who writes about it later, and put your name in a place a journalist or investor checks. What it will not do is pass authority, which is the one thing it is usually sold as doing.

The badge pattern is now the norm

Six of the 21 confirmed dofollow directories tie the free listing, the dofollow link, or both to a reciprocal badge on your own site. Fazier, ScrollLaunch, TheAIToolsDir, TheSaaSDir and Twelve Tools all do some version of it, and OpenHunts uses a badge to jump its queue.

The logic is straightforward. A directory that hands out free dofollow links to anyone who fills in a form gets scraped, spammed and eventually discounted. Tying the link to a badge is a cost the spammer will not pay. ScrollLaunch is explicit about the mechanism: your link is dofollow only while the badge is installed.

We use the same shape here. LetsLaunch is free with no queue, and the dofollow link is earned by putting our badge on your site rather than bought.

Worth knowing before you install six badges: they are visible on your own pages, and they point outward. One or two on a footer is normal. A wall of them looks like what it is.

Be honest about what this is worth

Twenty-one dofollow links from directories will not rank a site. They are a modest, one-off input: some early crawl paths to a new domain, a bit of non-branded anchor variety, and a handful of pages that mention what you do. The sites that win on search win on the thing itself — pages worth linking to, a product people mention without being asked.

Treat a directory round as a day's work with a small, real payoff, not as a growth strategy. If someone is selling you a package of 200 directory submissions, they are selling volume of exactly the thing that has diminishing returns.

The practical version: work through the confirmed free four and the free tiers above, budget for one or two paid listings if the audience genuinely fits, and skip anything that only claims dofollow in its own sales copy. The full set of 51 with what we could confirm on each lives on the directories index, and if you want to be on this list yourself you can submit your product.

How to check any directory yourself

You do not need a script. Two minutes per directory:

1. Open any live listing on that directory, ideally one for a product like yours.
2. Find the button that goes to the product's own website. Right-click it and choose "Inspect", or open the page source and search for the product's domain.
3. Look at the anchor tag. If you see rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc", the link does not pass authority. If there is no rel at all, or it only contains values like noopener and noreferrer, it is dofollow.

Two things to watch. Check a free listing rather than a featured one, because some sites mark them differently. And check the outbound link, not the internal links on the page, which are always dofollow and prove nothing.

Do that on any site before you pay it, and re-check a few months after you are listed. Policies change quietly, which is how the listicles got it wrong in the first place.