I checked the rel attribute on 13 startup directories. Only 3 pass link equity.

id wang — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:22:01 +0000

I spent two days submitting a side project to startup directories. Before writing a single form field, I started measuring one thing nobody seems to publish: the actual rel attribute on the outbound link each directory gives you.

The results changed which directories I bothered with.

The method

Open a directory's existing product page — someone else's, not yours — and read the anchor that points to that product's website:

[...document.querySelectorAll('a[href]')]
  .filter(a => a.href.includes('theproductsdomain.com'))
  .map(a => ({ href: a.href, rel: a.rel || '(none -> followed)' }))

That's it. No account, no submission, no payment. You learn whether the link is worth your time before you spend an hour on their form.

The results

Directory	`rel`	Free?
Product Hunt	`noreferrer noopener ugc`	free
Indie Hackers	`nofollow noopener`	free
AlternativeTo	`nofollow noopener`	free
Crunchbase	`nofollow noopener noreferrer`	free
Peerlist	`noreferrer nofollow ugc`	free
SaaSHub	`nofollow`	free
itch.io	`nofollow noopener`	free
Futurepedia	`nofollow`	$247
twelve.tools	`noopener`	free + reciprocal link
Uneed	`noopener`	$14.99
Toolify	`dofollow`	$99
BetaList	301 redirect, followed	$39

Three things I did not expect

1. The directories that pass link equity are the ones selling links

Every directory in that table that gives a followed link either charges for it or requires a reciprocal link from your homepage. Not one hands it out for free.

Toolify's submission page says the quiet part out loud: "Get dofollow links and boost your SEO. Your website will get no less than 6 quality dofollow links." $99. That's link scheme territory — paid links passing ranking credit, not marked sponsored. The risk lands on the buyer.

twelve.tools does the barter version: free tier, but "A backlink to our site is required (on your homepage or footer)". Their badge anchor is rel="noreferrer noopener" — no nofollow. So you hand over a real followed link from your homepage and get one back. Reciprocal exchange, also on Google's list.

This isn't a coincidence. A directory giving away followed links unconditionally would get strip-mined by SEO arbitrage within a month. So the ones with a brand to protect use nofollow, and the ones willing to pass equity charge for it.

2. The link is often not an anchor at all

BetaList's product page has no <a> pointing to the product's site. "Visit Site" goes to /startups/<slug>/visit, an internal path that 301s outward. Their robots.txt doesn't block it, so it still passes — but if you check with "does this page contain a link to my domain", you'll conclude the site gives you nothing. I did, at first.

Peerlist goes further: on an unlaunched project the visit control is <button href="...">. An href on a button is not a link. Crawlers don't follow it.

So the check needs three steps: find the control by its label ("Visit", "Website"), not by its host; if it points to an internal path, check the status code; then check robots.txt for that path.

3. Your page may not get the same `rel` as the page you measured

This is the one that cost me. On AlternativeTo I measured Roll20's entry — clean rel="noopener". Then I submitted my own and measured again:

rel="nofollow noopener"

The page also says "Your submission is waiting to be reviewed." Reviewed listings appear to get followed links; pending ones don't. Reasonable anti-spam design — and completely invisible until you check your own page.

Measuring someone else's page tells you whether a directory is worth trying. It does not tell you what you will get.

What I'd do differently

Measure rel before filling any form. It takes seconds and it killed two $99–$247 submissions for me.
Treat "free + followed link" as a red flag, not a find. Ask what they're taking instead.
Re-measure your own page after publishing.
Don't let nofollow alone decide. I published to Indie Hackers knowing it was nofollow, because the audience was right. Referral traffic and discoverability are real — they're just not link equity, and conflating the two is how you end up paying $247 for a nofollow.

For context on why I was doing this at all: I build RPG Builder, a toolkit for D&D 5e dungeon masters, and I was looking for places to list it. The directory hunt turned out to be more interesting than the listings.

If you've measured a directory that isn't in the table, I'd like to hear the number.

DEV Community: id wang