Backlink Directory
116 places to submit your startup that are actually worth the hour — scored by pricing, link type, how hard they are to get into, and how much the placement is really worth. Free to use, no signup.
Most backlink lists optimise for length. They are scraped, never checked, and half the entries are auto-approve pages built to sell submissions to founders who do not know the difference. A link from one directory with editorial standards and real traffic is worth more than fifty from a list like that — and the list like that can actively hurt you.
So this one is deliberately short. Every site here is either reviewed by a human, browsed by a real audience, or both. Each row tells you what it costs, whether the link is dofollow, how hard it is to get accepted, and our honest read on whether the placement is worth your time. Pro Launch is in the table too, in its natural position and marked as ours — you can judge it against everything else on the same terms.
Browse all submission sites
How we score these sites
Difficulty and Signal are editorial judgments, not metrics. We deliberately do not publish Domain Rating or Domain Authority numbers here — we cannot verify them, they go stale within weeks, and a confident-looking number you cannot check is worse than no number at all. Here is exactly what each column means instead.
Pricing
- Free
- No fee to be listed at all.
- Freemium
- A free tier exists alongside paid placement or a faster queue.
- Paid
- There is no free route onto the site.
Link
- Dofollow
- The outbound link on your listing passes ranking value.
- Nofollow
- It does not — you are there for the referral traffic.
- Mixed
- It varies by tier, placement, or how the listing is configured.
Difficulty
- Easy
- Open submission. Approval is quick and close to automatic.
- Medium
- A review queue, a vendor verification step, or a paid tier to clear.
- Hard
- Editorial or community gatekeeping. Rejection is a normal outcome.
Signal
- 5
- Category-defining. Worth building a launch around.
- 4
- Strong on at least two of link value, traffic, and permanence.
- 3
- Solid, unremarkable, worth the twenty minutes.
- 1–2
- Batch it with others or skip it. Never pay for these.
How to work through this list efficiently
Submitting to a hundred sites in one sitting is how founders burn a weekend and get nothing. The order matters more than the volume.
Prepare the submission kit once
Almost every site below asks for the same things: a name, a one-line tagline, a short and a long description, a category, a pricing model, a logo, and two to four screenshots. Write them once in a single document and each submission takes five minutes instead of forty.
Start with high signal, then work down
Sort by Signal and start at the top of the categories that match your product. Ten well-chosen listings beat all sixty submitted indiscriminately, and the ones with a review queue are usually the ones worth waiting for.
Space the submissions out
Fifty new links appearing in a week looks like exactly what it is. Spread them across a few weeks, and cluster the dated launch placements on a single morning so the spikes overlap into something that reads as momentum.
Audit the listings twice a year
Screenshots go stale, pricing changes, and links break during redesigns. A listing showing an interface you replaced eighteen months ago does more harm than no listing at all. Reclaiming a dead link takes one email.
Three playbooks go deeper on this: the SaaS backlink foundation covers where a new product's first fifty links come from, the AI directory submission strategy explains how to separate the curated from the automated, and the multi-directory launch strategy shows how to sequence the dated placements so the spikes overlap.
The distribution layer behind every playbook
Most of these strategies need somewhere to actually publish, launch, or be listed. These four are the placements the playbooks reference most often — each one permanent, indexable, and pointed at founders who are already looking for new products.
Featured launch slot
Book a Tuesday launch day with priority placement on the homepage, the weekly leaderboard, and the launch newsletter.
Guest post
Publish a long-form article on the Pro Launch blog with contextual links back to your product.
Sponsored listing
Hold a fixed slot at the top of the directory for a full month, above every organic result.
Permanent project page
Every submission keeps a permanent, indexable page with your screenshots, description, and a backlink to your site.
Frequently Asked Questions
Keep going
Getting listed is one layer. If you want the strategy around it, or a launch slot to anchor the whole thing to, start here — and see what a paid launch costs or submit your project when you are ready.
Launch Playbooks
Step-by-step strategies for SaaS, AI tools, e-commerce, and developer products — including the backlink foundation and directory submission playbooks.
ExploreFree SEO Tools
Check your broken links, preview your SERP snippet, generate schema markup, and audit the technical basics before you start submitting.
ExploreThe Pro Launch Blog
Longer-form writing on distribution, launch strategy, and the parts of SEO that actually move the needle for a young domain.
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