Product and Startup Directories Worth Submitting To

Two things in this table work differently from the rest of the site.

The first is the Link type column. Here nofollow is common, and it is no reason to skip an entry. Several of the larger sites use it as a matter of policy, partly because they are the ones everybody wants a link from. Read the column, then weigh it last.

The second is that not every entry is a directory in the narrow sense. Some are software review sites where your profile collects customer reviews, and one is a marketplace that sells your product and takes a share of each sale. They are here because a product page on them is a lasting thing that people find. Where a row works differently from a plain listing, its note says so, so you can decide whether it fits.

Read any row marked Not checked as a lead to confirm, not as a recommendation.

Focus on the order you do things in rather than how many sites you hit, because for two or three of these the timing decides everything.

Pick one site for the launch itself and treat everything else as the week after. A launch site rewards preparation that has nothing to do with its form: people who already know you are launching, screenshots that make sense to someone who has never heard of you, and being around to answer every comment on the day rather than at the weekend.

Do the pre launch listings before that. They are how the first few people hear about your product early, and several of them have queues measured in weeks, so a submission made the day before launch goes live long after it.

Then spread the rest over the following fortnight. You gain nothing by doing them all on launch day, and you lose something, because each listing is a small piece of news you could have used later.

Skip the launch sites. They are built for a moment you have already had, and posting an eighteen month old product as new is the kind of thing those communities notice.

Your list is the databases: software indexes, alternatives sites and review platforms. These show up in category and comparison searches for years, which is slower than a launch day spike and lasts much longer. It is also the closest thing on this page to how directories work everywhere else on this site.

The real work there is the profile rather than the submission. Write full descriptions, keep pricing current, add screenshots that load, and on the review platforms, get actual reviews. An empty profile on a strong site is worse than none, because it ranks for your name and shows visitors nothing.

Set aside an afternoon to do four of these properly, rather than a morning to do twelve badly.

These offers target exactly this category, and it helps to know why they are so cheap.

The lists are automated submissions to sites that accept anything, so nobody browses them, so a listing there does nothing for you. The seller is not lying about the work. They really will submit you five hundred times. What they are overstating is what those five hundred listings are worth.

The direct harm is small, since a pile of low quality listings is mostly ignored rather than penalised. The real cost is believing the job is done, and losing the afternoon you could have spent on the four listings that would have counted.

If you want volume, the safer version is on the general web directories page of this site. It is free, takes an afternoon, and we describe it for exactly what it is worth.

Expect a launch day to bring visitors, and expect most of them not to come back. That is normal. A few hundred people looking at something new and forty of them trying it is a good day, and the ones who stay matter more than the total who arrived.

Expect the ranking benefit to be small and indirect. Many of the strong entries here are nofollow, so what you are really getting is discovery. The links that help come later, from people who found you through a listing and wrote about you on their own sites.

Expect the databases to be slow but lasting. A well kept profile on a software index can send a steady trickle of visitors for years, and it is the one thing on this page that behaves like the directories elsewhere on this site.

Expect most of these sites to ask for money at some point, usually to skip a queue or to feature your listing. Paying to skip a free queue is a perfectly reasonable purchase, as long as you know that speed is what you are paying for. That is why the Cost column separates a genuinely free route from a free label with a paid option sitting next to it.

None of this is yet a record of what happened when we submitted to these sites ourselves, because that test has not been run. When it has, this section will report counts instead of expectations.

Skip this page if you do not have a product. It sounds obvious, but it is the most common mistake here. A services business, agency or local company will find nothing on this page that fits, and these sites will either reject the listing or bury it. The agency directories page, under web directories, is built for you instead.

Skip it if your product is not ready for strangers. A launch site gives you one go in front of a real audience, and if you spend it on something half finished, you do not get it back. Nothing here has to happen this month.

If you are already past launch, skip the launch sites in particular and go straight to the databases.

And skip this page entirely if ranking credit is what you are after. This category is not built for that. The general web directories page will not give you a lot, but the links you do get there will count.