In part one of this series we listed five free directories that give your SaaS a do-follow backlink and a product page of its own. We were careful to hedge at the time: directory links establish a floor, not a ceiling, and we could not promise Google would do anything with them.
Six weeks have passed. We now know what Google did, because we have been watching the Search Console data for InterviewAce — the AI interview co-pilot we build and operate — the entire time. That changes this article from a list into something considerably more useful: a list plus evidence.
Two findings genuinely surprised us, and both contradict advice you will read elsewhere. We will cover those first, because they change how you should evaluate every directory in the second half of this article. Then: eight more directories, all verified live, all confirmed do-follow, all with a dedicated page for your product.
What Six Weeks of Search Console Data Actually Showed
When we published part one, three of the five listings were not in Google’s index at all. We checked each one with a site: query and found nothing. Only two - Forg.to and Gets.tools - had made it in. We said at the time that the other three were a "not yet" rather than a "never," and that the fix was to give Googlebot a crawl path by linking to those listing pages from pages Google already crawls regularly.
That is exactly what happened. Startup Fame and SaaSCity both moved from completely absent to appearing in the Search Console link report. The listing pages got crawled, got indexed, and their links started being attributed. Nothing else changed in the interim — no resubmission, no outreach, no paid promotion. They simply needed a route in and enough time.
The single most common reason a directory backlink “does not work” is that you checked too early. Indexing lag between submitting a listing and seeing the link counted ran to roughly six weeks in our case — and the pages that eventually landed looked identical to the ones that had not, right up until they did.
This is worth internalising because it inverts the usual advice. Most guides tell you to submit widely and move on. The data says something different: submitting is the cheap part, and the expensive part — getting the listing page crawled and indexed — is the part almost nobody does deliberately. A handful of listings you actively help Google discover will outperform fifty you fire off and forget.
The Second Finding: Link Count Is Not Link Value
Here is the result that genuinely caught us out. One directory in our profile shows 39 linking pages in Search Console — far more than any other source, by an order of magnitude. On any dashboard that ranks referring domains by volume, it sits at the very top.
We inspected the actual HTML of that listing. The link to our site carries rel="nofollow".
It passes no authority whatsoever. It is 39 rows of nothing, sitting at the top of the report, looking like the most valuable backlink source we have.
The lesson is that Search Console’s link report shows you links Google found, not links Google follows. Nofollow links appear there alongside do-follow ones with no visual distinction between them. If you judge your backlink profile by what ranks highest in that report — or by the referring-domain counts in any third-party tool — you will systematically mistake your most worthless links for your best ones.
This is not a rare edge case. When we audited the full set of directories InterviewAce is listed on, a substantial minority turned out to be nofollow despite marketing themselves on the strength of their backlinks. Some of the most confident-sounding “featured on” badges point at links that pass nothing at all.
Every one of the eight directories below has been individually verified: we fetched the live listing page, found the anchor tag pointing at our domain, and confirmed there is no nofollow on it. That check takes about ten seconds and it is the highest-value ten seconds in this entire discipline.
The Sixth Vetting Criterion
Part one gave five criteria for judging a directory: a dedicated page per product, a do-follow outbound link, genuine domain history, a free tier that does not hide the link behind a paywall, and transparency about reciprocal requirements. Those all still hold. The data above adds a sixth, and in practice it outranks most of the others.
Check whether the platform’s listing pages get indexed as a class. Before submitting anywhere, run a site: query against the listing path itself - site:example.com/product/ or whatever the pattern is. If Google returns hundreds of other products' pages, the platform gets its listings indexed and yours stands a good chance. If it returns almost nothing, that directory is a dead end no matter how impressive its domain rating looks.
This one criterion would have saved us the most time in part one. The highest-authority directory on that list was, at the six-week mark, still the only one whose page had not been indexed — while two small, unglamorous platforms had sailed straight in. Domain rating is a poor predictor here. Crawl-budget economics is the real mechanism: enormous platforms generating templated pages at scale get indexed selectively, while focused platforms with modest catalogues get indexed thoroughly.
A Note on This Batch
One deliberate choice before the list. Every directory below is one that Google has not yet discovered our listing on. None of them appear in our Search Console link report at the time of writing.
That is not an oversight — it is the point. Listing directories that already work would tell you nothing you could act on. These eight are the live experiment: verified do-follow, verified live, dedicated page each, and currently invisible to Google. Part one’s five listings were in exactly this position eight weeks ago, and all five have since been counted. When we revisit this batch in part three, you will be able to see the same process play out with a fresh set — including any that never make it, which is the outcome most guides quietly omit.
- Nick Launches
What it is. A launch directory giving each product its own page under a /products/ path, with the full product story rather than a single-line catalogue entry.
Why it is worth your time. The listing page leads its own title tag with the product’s category descriptor before the brand name — “Interview Copilot — InterviewAce” in our case. That is a meaningful detail: the page is structured to rank for category terms rather than only for your brand, which makes it useful to you even before it passes any authority. The outbound link is clean do-follow and fully server-rendered.
How to get listed. Free submission. The badge they provide is UTM-tagged, so referral traffic from it shows up cleanly separated in your analytics.
Our listing: nicklaunches.com/products/interviewace
- Launchpadly
What it is. A startup directory with a dedicated page per startup under /startup/, plus an embeddable badge system with several display variants.
Why it is worth your time. Do-follow, server-rendered, and the listing page references your domain in several distinct places — the main call to action, the badge embed and the metadata. Multiple references to the same target on one page is not multiple backlinks, but it does give Googlebot more than one route to notice the destination, and it means a layout change on their end is less likely to silently drop your only link.
How to get listed. Free submission. The badge system exposes a “listed-on” variant that is more honest than a “featured” claim if you have not actually been featured — worth using the accurate one.
Our listing: launchpadly.co/startup/interviewace
- Looking For Tools
What it is. A tool-discovery directory with per-project pages under /projects/, aimed at people actively hunting for something to solve a specific problem.
Why it is worth your time. Clean do-follow — the anchor carries only rel="noopener", which has no effect on how Google treats the link. The catalogue is focused rather than sprawling, and as we covered above, focused catalogues get crawled far more completely than platforms generating pages at industrial scale. Small directories are systematically underrated for exactly this reason.
How to get listed. Free project submission with category tags and a UTM-tagged badge.
Our listing: lookingfortools.com/projects/interviewace
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- Software Bolt
What it is. A software product directory with per-product pages, category filing and year-stamped listings.
Why it is worth your time. Do-follow verified, dedicated page, and the listing page renders your product name and category into its own title tag — so it can rank for your brand independently of your site. That is the underrated second benefit of a good listing: an additional indexed page describing your product, on a domain that is not yours, reinforcing the same entity to both search engines and AI answer engines.
How to get listed. Free product submission with category selection. Note it shares a submission pattern with several sibling directories, which is worth knowing when you get to number eight on this list.
Our listing: softwarebolt.com/product/interviewace
- EasyLaunch
What it is. A SaaS-focused directory organising products under a /saas/ path, with a straightforward submission flow and a badge programme.
Why it is worth your time. Clean do-follow link, dedicated page, and a narrow enough focus that the catalogue stays browsable rather than becoming an undifferentiated dump. That focus is what tends to correlate with good indexation — a platform with a few thousand curated listings gets crawled far more completely than one generating pages by the hundred thousand.
How to get listed. Free submission. The badge they offer resolves through a www redirect, so use the www form of the badge image URL if you place one, and save yourself a hop.
Our listing: easylaunch.dev/saas/interviewace
- Startup Finds
What it is. A startup discovery directory with per-project pages under /projects/, oriented toward early-stage products looking for their first users.
Why it is worth your time. Do-follow verified, dedicated page, and the audience skews toward people actively looking for new tools rather than passive browsers. Referral traffic from a directory like this is small in absolute terms but unusually well-qualified, and it keeps arriving whether or not Google ever indexes the page — which is the part of directory value that never depends on the index at all.
How to get listed. Free project submission with category tags. Choose tags deliberately; they are the primary discovery route on the platform.
Our listing: startupfinds.com/projects/interviewace
- GoodAITools
What it is. A curated directory specifically for AI tools, with products filed under category paths and a listing page per tool.
Why it is worth your time. Topical relevance is a ranking factor in its own right, and a specialist AI directory beats a general business directory of equivalent authority when your product is AI-adjacent. A link from a page about AI assistants, on a domain about AI tools, pointing at an AI assistant, is a far cleaner signal than the same link from a generic listing. These specialist directories are also disproportionately represented in the sources AI answer engines draw on when summarising a product category.
How to get listed. Free submission into a specific AI category. Pick the narrowest accurate category rather than the broadest.
Our listing: https://goodaitools.com/ai/interviewace
- SaaS Roots
What it is. A SaaS product directory with per-product pages, category filing, and a year-stamped listing format.
Why it is worth your time. Do-follow verified and a clean dedicated page. It belongs to a family of similarly structured directories that share a submission pattern, which is genuinely useful once you notice it: your asset kit slots straight into several platforms in a row with almost no rework. Submit to one, and the next four take a couple of minutes each.
How to get listed. Free product submission with category selection and a description field that rewards specificity.
Our listing: https://saasroots.com/product/interviewace
How to Check a Link Yourself in Ten Seconds
Given how much of this article turns on the nofollow distinction, here is the check, concretely. Once your listing is approved and live:
Open the live listing page, find the link that points at your site, right-click it and choose Inspect. Look at the anchor tag. If you see rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc" in there, the link passes no authority. If the rel attribute is absent, empty, or contains only noopener and noreferrer, you have a genuine do-follow link. Those two values are security and privacy hints; neither has any effect on how Google treats the link.
Do this after approval, never before. Directories change link policy over time, and the only source of truth is the page as it currently renders. A directory that was do-follow last year may not be today.
The updated checklist
Before submitting: run site:domain.com/listing-path/ to confirm the platform's listing pages get indexed as a class. If they do not, skip it entirely.
After approval: inspect the anchor tag on your live listing and confirm there is no nofollow.
Then, and this is the step everyone skips: link to your new listing page from somewhere Google already crawls often. That is what converts a submitted listing into a counted backlink, and in our data it was the difference between three dead listings and three live ones.
What to Realistically Expect
Same honesty as part one, now backed by numbers rather than estimates. Expect roughly four to eight weeks between submitting a listing and seeing anything attributed in Search Console, assuming the page gets indexed at all. Expect a meaningful fraction never to get indexed — that is a normal outcome and not a sign you did anything wrong.
Expect brand-name impressions to move before anything else does. And expect the aggregate effect to be modest and cumulative rather than dramatic: this work gets you out of the zero-backlink hole and gives search engines several consistent descriptions of what your product is, which is the precondition for everything else you might do later.
What you should not do is buy bulk submissions. The services offering hundreds of listings for a small fee are submitting to precisely the link farms Google devalued years ago, and a sudden flood of low-quality referring domains is a pattern that attracts the wrong sort of attention. Thirteen good listings across two parts of this series beat thirteen hundred bad ones, and it is not close.
Coming in Part 3
The next instalment covers directories with higher submission friction — the ones with a human reviewer who can say no. That friction is precisely why those links are worth more: a listing anyone can get is a listing that signals nothing. We will also revisit this batch with fresh Search Console data, so you can see which of these eight made it through and which did not.
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 get in touch and tell us what you are shipping.
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