Which Startup Directories Actually Give Dofollow Links (We Checked 104)

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

We track 104 directories. For each one we could, a script fetched one actual product page, 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.

Sixty-one of the 104 had a live listing page we could point the checker at. The results, in plain numbers:

• 34 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.
• 25 blocked. We asked and the site refused to answer — and each of those listings now publishes exactly why, on the directory's own page.
• 43 not yet checked, because we do not have a listing URL on them yet. They stay unknown until we do.

Those last two buckets need saying clearly, because they are the numbers a listicle would quietly round away into a green tick.

"Unverified" does not mean "bad"

Twenty-five directories were asked and would not answer. Most returned 403, two rate-limited us with a 429, one failed with a 526, and four build their listing links in the browser, so the HTML we fetched contained nothing to read. That is a statement about our request, not about their links.

We tried the obvious workaround before writing this. Sending a Chrome user agent instead of an honest one moved exactly one directory out of the unverified column — these sites fingerprint the TLS handshake and the HTTP/2 frame order, which no set of headers disguises. So we put our own user agent back, and each of those listings now says on its own page which of the three things happened and when we last tried. AlternativeTo, G2, Capterra, Crunchbase, StackShare, Slant, Wellfound, GetApp, Crozdesk, F6S, FinancesOnline, Startup Ranking, Toolify, There's An AI For That and Hacker News all sit in this group, along with Dev Hunt, SideProjectors, TopAI.tools and WIP, which build their listing links in the browser. Several of them are worth submitting to for reasons that have nothing to do with links, and some of them very likely are dofollow.

One finding surprised us enough to publish it on its own. We ran the identical check twice from two different machines — a laptop on a home connection, and the server this site runs on. Six directories answered one and refused the other: Product Hunt, Futurepedia, SaaSworthy, LaunchIgniter, Smol Launch and Launching Next all returned a verdict to the laptop and a block page to the datacentre IP.

The numbers on this page are the ones our own server sees, because those are the numbers behind the directory index you can click through to. But it means "is this directory dofollow" does not have one answer — it has an answer per asker. Any article quoting a single number for a site it never fetched, from a vantage point it never names, is guessing more than it knows.

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

The 34 confirmed dofollow directories

Eight of these are free with no paid tier at all. If you do nothing else on this page, do these:

Twenty-three 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 three 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. Find My AI Tool runs from $79.99 to $999.99 and asks for a badge on top — at the upper end of that range you are buying advertising, so judge it on referral traffic and not on the link.

The two confirmed nofollow

SourceForge and Tekpon mark their outbound links: every external link we read on those listing pages carried a suppressing rel. Both are still reasonable places to be — SourceForge has distribution most directories cannot match, 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 34 confirmed dofollow directories tie the free listing, the dofollow link, or both to a reciprocal badge on your own site: Fazier, Find My AI Tool, StartupBase, TheAIToolsDir, TheSaaSDir and Twelve Tools. ScrollLaunch does the same thing without recording it as a hard requirement — your link is dofollow only while the badge is installed — 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

Thirty-four 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 eight confirmed free ones 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 104 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.

Frequently asked questions

Does submitting my product to directories hurt SEO?

No, not the legitimate kind covered here. What can hurt a site is mass-submitting to link farms and low-quality directory networks built purely to sell backlinks — the practice Google's link-spam policy targets. A handful of real, checkable listings on sites makers actually use is a normal, small part of a new domain's link profile, not a penalty risk.

How many directory backlinks does a new SaaS actually need?

Not many. Thirty-four dofollow links from directories is a modest, one-off input — a bit of non-branded anchor variety and a few early crawl paths to a new domain, not a growth strategy. Budget a day's work to go through the free tier of the directories that genuinely fit your product, then move on to content and links that keep compounding on their own.

Should I pay for a directory listing to get the dofollow link?

Only when the paid tier is buying real traffic or placement, not just the link itself — a directory selling nothing but "guaranteed dofollow" is selling the exact thing that stops working once everyone can buy it. Work through the free options first; several of the confirmed dofollow directories above have a genuinely free route.

What's the actual difference between a dofollow and nofollow directory link?

A dofollow link passes ranking authority to your site; a nofollow one — marked with rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc" — does not, whatever traffic or visibility it still sends. The label is the only thing that matters for SEO purposes, which is why this whole piece is built around reading it directly rather than trusting a directory's own claim.

How often does a directory's dofollow status actually change?

Often enough that a listicle from even a year ago is unreliable — a site can flip its link policy by adding nine characters to a template. It can also simply answer differently depending on who is asking: six directories, Product Hunt included, gave our laptop a verdict and blocked our server outright. Re-check anything you are relying on, and don't trust a single number from a source that never says where it was checked from.