Disclosure up front: I run Liveupx (the agency below) and JustHunt, a directory-submission product I'll mention later. If that's a dealbreaker, fair — close the tab. If you keep reading, I'll try to earn the time.
The numbers
- Apr 14: liveupx.com → DR 20 (Ahrefs)
- Apr 28: liveupx.com → DR 45
Two weeks. No content blitz, no PR, no link buying.
Caveats before the playbook
A few things any builder should know before getting excited about a result like this:
- DR is noisy. The curve from 20 → 45 looks dramatic but is mostly Ahrefs catching up to a few dozen new referring domains. 50 → 75 is a different sport.
- DR ≠ revenue. It's a proxy for backlink trust, and that proxy weakens every year as Google leans harder on topical authority and user signals.
- "Two weeks" flatters the result. The submissions took ~4 hours of work. The DR catching up took another 7-10 days. I'm rounding.
- A 20 → 45 jump usually means the site was underrated at 20. If you're genuinely starting from zero, the curve is slower.
What I did
Submitted Liveupx to about 60 directories:
- ~15 general startup directories (Product Hunt, BetaList, Startup Stash, etc.)
- ~20 niche agency / B2B service directories
- ~10 "best of" listicle sites that accept submissions
- ~15 lower-tier directories where the marginal cost of one more submission is near zero
About 40 were accepted. The rest ghosted, asked for paid placement, or rejected without explanation.
The work itself is unglamorous data entry — same paragraph, same logo, same screenshot, sixty times. The non-obvious part: directory quality matters far more than count. Five DR-50+ directories with real editorial review beat thirty DR-10 link farms.
What didn't work
- "Free directories" lists from SEO blogs. Most are deindexed or carry Spam Scores north of 60. I had to remove Liveupx from four of them after noticing.
- Asking for backlinks on Reddit / Indie Hackers. Did nothing, felt gross.
- Agency blog guest posts at $200 each. Too slow, too expensive at this volume, mostly nofollow anyway.
- "Submit to 500 directories for $50" Fiverr gigs. Tried one on a different domain in March. Spam Score doubled in a month. Took longer to clean up than the DR gain was worth. Don't.
Why I think it actually worked
Three unsexy reasons:
- The directories I prioritized had real editorial gates — manual review filters out the link farms.
- I submitted with consistent NAP (name, address, phone) and varied anchor text the way a real business would.
- I did it as a batch, not a drip. Ahrefs seems to weight clustered references higher, though I can't prove this rigorously.
The tools
Two, both mine — disclosure noted:
- Free tier of justhunt.co — built it because I was tired of paying for Product Hunt boost services.
- JustHunt's enterprise directory submission service (paid) — handled the volume work for the 60 submissions.
I'm not unbiased here. If you want to do this without paying anyone (including me), the playbook is identical: pick 30-50 directories with real editorial review, write one paragraph carefully, and grind through the forms.
What I'd do differently
Track the referring domain quality distribution, not just the DR number. DR makes a clean before/after for a post like this; for actual decision-making I'd watch for new DR-30+ referring domains and ignore the long tail.
Happy to take questions, including skeptical ones about the JustHunt link.
Top comments (1)
here is the link: JustHunt.co