Backlinks are still one of the strongest ranking signals you can earn — and some of the cheapest ones are sitting in SaaS directories nobody talks about. Here are five free, genuinely indexed directories that give you a real do-follow link and a product page of your own, with the exact listings we built for our client InterviewAce.
Every new SaaS ships with the same invisible problem. The product works, the copy is sharp, the pricing page converts — and Google has absolutely no reason to trust the domain it lives on. You are a stranger on a web full of strangers, and the single clearest signal that you are not one is other websites linking to you.
That creates a genuine chicken-and-egg trap. Nobody links to a product they have never heard of, and nobody hears about a product that does not rank. Content marketing solves it eventually, but "eventually" is six to twelve months of writing before the compounding starts. Paid link placements solve it faster and carry real risk of a manual penalty. Somewhere between those two sits the boring, unglamorous option that still quietly works: getting listed in directories that actually have authority.
This is part one of a series. Each instalment covers a batch of directories we have used ourselves, verified as live, and confirmed as passing link equity. No affiliate deals, no paid placements, no "submit to 500 sites for $49" nonsense — just the ones that earned their spot. Let's start with the criteria, then the five.
Why Directory Backlinks Still Work in 2026
There is a persistent myth that Google killed directory links. What Google actually killed was link farms — pages that existed for no reason except to host outbound links, with no users, no curation, and no editorial standard. Those got devalued years ago and are not coming back.
What survived were directories that serve an actual audience. People genuinely browse comparison sites when they are shopping for software. People genuinely scroll launch directories looking for something new. Because those pages get real traffic and real engagement, the links on them still carry weight. The distinction is not "directory versus not" — it is "does anyone use this thing."
When you get a good listing, you are actually collecting three separate assets at once, and most people only count the first:
A do-follow link from an aged domain. This is the one everybody chases. A link from a domain that has existed for a decade and has accumulated its own authority is worth considerably more than a link from something registered last spring.
An indexable page that describes your product in your words. Every listing is a page on someone else's high-authority domain, containing your product name, your category keywords, and your positioning. That page can rank on its own — sometimes for queries your own site is not strong enough to win yet.
Entity and citation signals. This is the underrated one in 2026. When someone asks an AI assistant for "the best AI interview tools," the model is drawing on aggregator and directory pages as much as on vendor sites. Being consistently listed and consistently described across several directories is how you become a recognised entity rather than an unknown string. That is generative engine optimisation (GEO) in practice — the same discipline we described as a continuous audit loop in our piece on AI agent loops.
Do-Follow vs. No-Follow: The 30-Second Version
A link is do-follow by default. There is no attribute for it — it is simply a normal ahref with nothing added. That link passes authority from the linking page to yours.
A link becomes no-follow when the site adds rel="nofollow" (or rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc"). That is the site telling Google "we are pointing at this, but do not treat it as an endorsement." It still sends human traffic. It does not meaningfully move your rankings.
You can check any listing in about ten seconds: open your live listing page, right-click your product link, choose Inspect, and look at the anchor tag. If you see a rel attribute containing nofollow, you have a traffic link, not an authority link. Do this after approval, not before — plenty of directories change their policy over time, and the only source of truth is the rendered page.
None of this means no-follow links are worthless. Referral traffic is real, and a mixed link profile of do-follow and no-follow looks far more natural than an all-do-follow one. But when you are prioritising where to spend an afternoon, do-follow wins.
What Makes a Directory Worth Your Time
We run every candidate through the same five checks before it earns a submission. Roughly nine out of ten directories fail at least one of them, which is exactly why a short vetted list beats a long scraped one.
A dedicated page per product. If your product is one row in a table on a page shared with 200 others, the value is close to zero. You want a URL that belongs to you, with your name in it.
A do-follow outbound link. Verified on the live page after approval, as described above.
Genuine domain history. Age, an established index footprint, and a domain rating that reflects real accumulated links rather than a burst of self-referential ones. A brand-new "directory" passes nothing on, no matter what it promises.
A free tier that does not hide the link behind a paywall. Paid fast-track options are fine and often reasonable. But if the free listing is deliberately crippled with a no-follow link while the paid one is do-follow, you are not buying a listing — you are buying a link, which is a different and riskier transaction.
Transparency about reciprocal requirements. Which brings us to the question everyone asks.
The Reciprocal Badge Question
Many free directories will ask you to place their badge somewhere on your site, either as a requirement or as a way to skip the approval queue. Is that a link scheme?
In practice, no — not at this scale. Google's guidance targets excessive reciprocal linking, meaning link exchanges built purely to manipulate rankings. One badge in your footer pointing at a directory that legitimately lists you is ordinary web behaviour, and it has been since the 1990s.
The sensible discipline is proportion. Keep the number of reciprocal badges small, put them somewhere honest like a footer or a dedicated "as featured on" strip, and never build a wall of forty badges — that pattern looks exactly like what it is. If a directory demands a homepage link above the fold in exchange for a listing, that is a bad trade and you should skip it.
The test is simple: would you still place the badge if the link passed no authority at all? If the directory sends you real visitors and you are happy to be associated with it, the exchange is honest. If the only reason is the link juice, you are building a scheme.
- SaaSHub — The Comparison-Engine Play What it is. SaaSHub is an independent software marketplace and comparison directory that has been running since 2014. It organises products across categories — CRM, design, project management, developer tools and dozens more — and its defining feature is alternatives pages: structured comparisons of competing products in the same space.
Why it is worth your time. This is the highest-leverage listing on the list, and not only because of domain age. SaaSHub's alternatives pages rank for "[competitor] alternatives" queries, which is about as high-intent as search gets. Someone typing that phrase has already decided they want a tool in your category and is actively unhappy with the one they know. A listing puts you in front of that person, and you get the authority link on top of it.
How to get listed. Free product submission. You supply the product URL, a category, a short description and pricing details. Fill in every optional field — populated listings surface higher in their internal browse and comparison views.
Our listing: saashub.com/interviewace-online-alternatives
- Startup Fame — The Launch Directory What it is. Startup Fame is a curated startup directory that indexes companies by category, by location and by founder. Our listing sits under Jobs & Careers and is tagged to Bulgaria, which is where Autonix Lab is based.
Why it is worth your time. Approval is fast, the listing gets its own clean URL, and the multi-dimensional indexing means one submission produces several routes to your page — someone browsing a category, a country, or a founder profile can all land on you. The location tagging is quietly useful if you care about being discoverable in a specific market.
How to get listed. Free submission with an optional badge exchange that speeds up review. Lead with your tagline: it is displayed prominently and it is the first thing a browsing visitor reads.
Our listing: startupfa.me/s/interviewace
- Forg.to — The Maker Community Angle What it is. Forg.to is a product discovery platform built around a maker community. Listings carry category tags, and the platform layers on comments, exploration feeds and per-project analytics.
Why it is worth your time. The community layer is the differentiator. A listing here is not a static record — it can accumulate comments and engagement, which keeps the page alive rather than letting it decay into a dead entry. You also get feedback from people who build software for a living, which is worth something independent of SEO. Our project is tagged under HR, hiring and SaaS, so it surfaces to people browsing those categories specifically.
How to get listed. Free project submission. Choose your tags deliberately — they are the main discovery mechanism on the platform, and a vague tag set buries you.
Our listing: forg.to/projects/interviewace-51a6f561
Building a SaaS That Needs an Audience?
We design, build and ship AI products end to end — and then help them get found. If you are early enough that distribution is the hard part, that is a conversation worth having.
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- SaaSCity — The Isometric SaaS Directory What it is. SaaSCity describes itself as the first isometric SaaS directory — instead of a list, products are laid out as buildings in a browsable city. InterviewAce sits in the Productivity district.
Why it is worth your time. Novelty is an underrated ranking input, because novelty produces dwell time. People do not browse ordinary directory lists for fun; they do browse a city map for fun. That means longer sessions, more pages per visit, and better engagement signals across the whole domain — which lifts every listing on it, including yours. It is also memorable enough that people share it, which brings in links the directory itself benefits from.
How to get listed. Free submission into a category. Your logo does a lot of work here, since the visual layout means people see your mark before they read your name — make sure you upload a high-resolution version that reads clearly at small sizes.
Our listing: saascity.io/live/interviewace
- Gets.tools — The AI-Tools Discovery Hub What it is. Gets.tools is a curated discovery hub for AI tools and SaaS products, organised into categories like artificial intelligence, productivity and developer tools, with search across the catalogue.
Why it is worth your time. Category fit is the whole argument here. If you are shipping anything AI-adjacent, a specialist AI directory is worth more than a general one of equivalent authority, because the topical relevance of the linking page is itself a ranking factor. A link from a page about AI tools, on a domain about AI tools, pointing at an AI tool, is a much cleaner signal than the same link from a generic business listing. These are also exactly the pages that AI answer engines lean on when summarising a category.
How to get listed. Free product submission. Write the description for a reader who does not yet know your category exists — the listings that perform here explain the problem before the solution.
Our listing: gets.tools/product/interviewace
How We Did This for InterviewAce
InterviewAce is a real-time AI interview co-pilot that we designed, built and shipped end to end at Autonix Lab. It gives candidates live answer suggestions grounded in their own résumé during Zoom and Google Meet calls, invisible to the interviewer.
When it launched it had everything a product needs except one thing: a domain with no history, no links and no reason for Google to surface it. We had a working product and an empty backlink profile. Rather than buying placements, we ran a structured directory sprint — and the five listings above are what came out of round one.
The part that made it efficient was doing the preparation once. Before submitting anywhere, we assembled a single asset kit: the product name and URL, a one-line tagline, three descriptions at roughly 60, 160 and 400 characters, a square logo at 512px, three annotated screenshots, a fixed set of category tags, pricing, and a short founder bio. Every directory asks for a subset of those same fields in a slightly different order. With the kit ready, a submission takes four minutes instead of forty, and — more importantly — your product is described identically everywhere, which is precisely the consistency that builds a recognisable entity.
After that it was mechanical: submit in batches, log every submission with its date and status, wait for approval, then verify the live page and check whether the link came through do-follow. Where a listing was rejected or thin, we fixed the description and resubmitted rather than abandoning it.
The compounding effect is easy to miss. Five listings is not just five links — it is five indexable pages, on five aged domains, all describing the same product in the same language. That consistency is what turns a URL into an entity that search engines and AI assistants can actually recognise.
A Repeatable Submission Workflow
If you take one thing from this article, take the process rather than the list. Directories come and go; the workflow keeps working.
Step 1 — Build the asset kit once. Name, URL, tagline, three description lengths, square logo, screenshots, category tags, pricing, founder bio. Keep it in one document you can copy from.
Step 2 — Vet before you submit. Run each candidate through the five checks above. A rejected candidate costs you nothing; a bad listing costs you an afternoon and gives you nothing back.
Step 3 — Submit in batches. Five to ten at a sitting, with the kit open beside you. Batching is dramatically faster than one-at-a-time because you stay in the same mental context.
Step 4 — Track everything. A simple sheet with directory, submission date, status, live URL and do-follow yes/no. Without it you will resubmit to places you have already been listed on and forget the ones still pending.
Step 5 — Verify after approval. Open the live page, inspect the link, confirm the description rendered correctly. Then add the URL to your tracking sheet and, if you promised a badge, place it.
What to Realistically Expect
Honesty matters more than enthusiasm here, because the wrong expectations are how people conclude that SEO "does not work."
Listings typically get indexed within days to a few weeks. Authority accrues over months, not days. Five directory links will not vault you past an incumbent with ten years of history and thousands of referring domains — nothing will, quickly. What they do is establish a floor: they get you out of the zero-backlink hole, they give search engines multiple consistent descriptions of what you are, and they make every subsequent link you earn land on a domain that already has some standing.
Measure it properly. Watch referring domains in Search Console, impressions for your brand name and category terms, and referral sessions from the directories themselves in your analytics. Brand-name impressions are usually the first thing to move, and it is the clearest early sign the entity signal is landing.
And a warning worth repeating: do not buy bulk directory submissions. The services offering hundreds of listings for a small fee submit to exactly the link farms Google already devalued, and a sudden flood of low-quality referring domains is a pattern that draws the wrong kind of attention. Five good listings beat five hundred bad ones, and it is not close. If you want to understand where link building fits into a broader plan, our write-up on AI strategy and ROI covers how we think about sequencing growth work.
Coming in Part 2
Five directories is a start, not a strategy. In the next instalment we will cover the next batch — including several that take more effort to get into, which is precisely why the links are worth more. The general rule is that the friction of a submission correlates with the value of the resulting link, and the highest-value directories are the ones with a human reviewer who can say no.
If you are building something and distribution is the part keeping you up at night, that is the work we do — we build AI products end to end and then help them get found. Have a look at what we offer, or just get in touch and tell us what you are shipping.
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