Do directory backlinks still work, and what nofollow actually costs you

Search "startup directories" and the first thing you will be sold is a link. Usually a dofollow one, usually for money, usually alongside a domain rating screenshot and a promise about authority.

We run a directory and we make every outbound link nofollow by default. It seems worth explaining why, because the honest version of this answer is more useful than the sales pitch.

What nofollow actually means

A link with rel="nofollow" tells search engines not to pass ranking credit through it. Since 2019 Google has treated it as a hint rather than a strict rule, which means it may still be used for discovery, but you should assume it passes no ranking weight and plan accordingly.

What nofollow does not do is make the link worthless. A nofollow link still:

• Gets clicked by people who are reading the page
• Tells a search engine your page exists, which matters for a brand new domain
• Appears in the referral data in your analytics, so you can see what it actually sent you

What it does not do is move you up the rankings on its own. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Why paid dofollow listings are a risk you inherit

Selling a dofollow link is, in Google's own words, a link scheme. The seller is not the one who carries the risk. You are, because the link points at your site.

The pattern is easy for a search engine to spot. A directory with thousands of listings, every outbound link followed, every listing published within seconds of payment, and the descriptions scraped from the products' own pages. That footprint is not subtle, and when the directory gets devalued, everything it points at gets the same treatment.

You are also paying for something whose value is entirely speculative. A dofollow link from a domain with no editorial standard is worth roughly what its editorial standard suggests.

What a directory listing is genuinely worth

Three things, none of which is a rankings bump:

A page that ranks for your specific problem. Not your brand name. If your listing carries an original description of what you built, it can rank for the phrase someone types when they do not yet know your product exists. That is the whole game for a new tool.

Qualified people. Someone browsing a directory of tools has already told you what they want. That is a warmer visitor than most paid traffic.

A reference that outlives your launch week. Launch platforms are a single day. A directory listing sits there for years, and keeps being found.

Notice that all three depend on the listing being read by humans and indexed as original content. None of them depend on the link attribute.

How we handle it here

Every listing on this site links out with nofollow. A person on our team can grant a followed link on an individual listing, by hand, when the listing has earned it. There is no way to buy that and no tier that includes it. Our about page sets out the rest of how listings get published.

We also require an original description of between 350 and 2000 characters, written about that product and no other. That rule is not there to make submission annoying. It is there because a directory full of duplicated copy is a directory that stops ranking, and then nobody's listing is worth anything.

What to do instead of chasing links

Pick the directories your customers actually read. Write a genuinely good description for each one, different each time. Fill in every field. Then judge the result by referral traffic in your analytics, not by a domain rating in someone's pitch deck.

If that sounds like the kind of listing you want, submit your tool and we will read it properly. There is nothing to pay, and no placement for sale.

For the practical side of preparing a submission, we wrote a companion piece on getting your SaaS listed without losing a week.