Directory Submission Sites List, With DR and Link Type

What is directory submission?

Directory submission is listing your website on directories through their own submission forms. A directory submission website takes what you send and a person or a script checks it; then the listing goes up on a page of the directory's own, often with a Visit button that points at your domain. Some directories ask for nothing more. Others want a badge or a link back on your site first. Some sell a faster review and many let you edit the listing later from an account.

Directory submission in SEO

In off-page SEO, directory submission is link building. Every directory that links you adds one referring domain, and referring domains are what a Domain Rating summarises. A listing also gives crawlers a path to a site nobody links to yet, and it puts your product on a page people browse when they look for tools of its kind. SEO directory submission pays when the link passes the four tests we put a listing link through: followed and pointed at your domain, on an indexed page, from a directory with links of its own and kept live.

Does directory submission still work for SEO?

Yes, on directories that are still alive and still link out in a way a crawler can follow. A followed listing on a live directory with referring domains of its own is a backlink like any other, and how many of them a new site needs depends on the pages it has to beat. A listing on a domain that has stopped resolving is no link at all. That is the trouble with the long lists of directory submission sites for SEO that rank for this search, as the counts further down show.

Directory submission sites list, by what a listing gives you

Four tables, one for each thing a listing can give you. Each runs from the highest Domain Rating down, and the referring-domain count beside it is the number of separate sites linking to that directory, the figure the rating is built from. The guide column links our page on submitting there: its form, its price and what its live listings link like. Two rows are ours, AlterBase and AffyList, and the DR column says so. For one kind of product at a time, the same catalog is cut into AI tool directories and SaaS directories.

The largest group comes first: 85 sites for directory submission recorded as dofollow with no badge needed. Of those, 25 have a DR of 50 or more, and 8 carry a no-equity mark beside the DR: their live listings pass no link equity, and their guides show how. Most take a form and a review queue; a few, like Viberank, publish the listing as soon as you submit.

In the second table the followed link comes with a condition. Of these 29 directory submission websites, 21 require a badge or a link back on your site, for the listing, the followed link or both. The other 8 offer one as the way to a better listing. Several sell a paid route around it instead: Twelve Tools asks $36. Nor are they the weak end of the list: 19 of the 29 have a DR of 50 or more, against 25 of the 85 in the first table.

Each of those badges is code on your site, and the directories that check for it drop the link when a redesign removes it. With Submitator that code is ours. One component on your site carries every badge your directories want; we keep every one of them live and you never commit anything per directory. When a link back is a fair price is a question of its own.

Nofollow asks search engines to pass no ranking credit through the link. These 35 sites still publish a page about your product with a link visitors can follow, and 3 of them tie the listing to a badge as well. How to read the rel on a listing yourself is covered in a separate post.

Our catalog has no link type yet for these 30. Some are among the biggest names on the list, and for two of them our guides read the link off the live pages: Product Hunt tags it ugc, and a new Hacker News story stays nofollow while its score is below about twenty points.

Free directory submission sites

Most of the directories with a guide in these tables take a free directory submission, and what changes from one to the next is what you pay instead of money: a badge to keep up, a link to return, months in a queue or a link that passes nothing. What each kind of free costs has a post of its own. The 19 below are free directory submission sites by our guides to them, and they ask nothing of your site at all, from DR 40 up.

Uneed (DR 76), the strongest of them, closes its free line when it fills; through Submitator you can always launch there. Below DR 40, our guides say the same of Made with React.js, AnyFP, kis.tools and Startup Alternatives, among others, and the guide column in the tables above links each one. On the badge directories the free route is the badge itself: Startup Fame, Twelve Tools and Turbo0 list you free once their badge or link is on your site, and placing it is our job.

Best directories for backlinks on this list

Directory submission backlinks are worth what the link on the live listing is worth, so the best directories for backlinks are the followed ones whose listings we have counted. Without a badge, those are:

• Uneed (DR 76): followed on 24 of 27 recent launches
• CtrlAlt.CC (DR 52): followed on 80 of 80 listings
• Viberank (DR 52): followed on all 450 app pages
• PromoteProject (DR 50): 238 of 238 links followed, two per profile

On the badge side, where we place the badge for you, Startup Fame (DR 84), Twelve Tools (DR 83) and Turbo0 (DR 81) have counts of their own. They are in the post on directory backlinks linked above, beside the rest of its followed shortlist.

Why not a list of 5,000 directory submission sites?

The lists that turn up most often for searches like this one are agency blogs with 300 to 580 sites each, and people search for a 5,000 directory submission sites list too. Here is what two of them held on 27 October 2026. Serpmaestro's list, updated on 24 October 2026, holds 315 rows. Its first entries include Facebook Pages, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, Google Business Profile and Yelp: the listings a local business needs. Of its 315 rows, 62 point at sites that no longer load a page, and another 7 at parked domains or casino and slot pages. Yelo Marketing's list, titled 400+, holds 334 different sites once its repeats are merged: 31 do not load and 8 are parked, for sale or casino and slot pages.

Neither prints a link type or a badge rule, and between them they name 8 of the 179 directories on this page. On Serpmaestro's, 126 of the domains carry the word directory in their own name. Those are general web directories, and which of that kind still work gets a post of its own. A list that long is hard to keep alive. Ours is smaller on purpose: a directory joins our catalog when a submission to it runs end to end, and our terms count a directory while we actively submit to it, so one that shuts down or degrades comes out.

How to submit to directories

Website directory submission goes the same way on almost every site in these tables. The long form, with every field prepared once and its limits, is a guide of its own; the short form takes five steps.

1. Pick from the tables by link type and badge rule first and by DR second, since the rating describes the directory and not your link. For a directory that is not here, our free DR checker reads its Domain Rating.
2. Write the listing to each form. One wants a URL and nothing more and builds the page from your own title, description and image, which the link preview checker shows the way a scraper reads them; the next wants a long description, FAQ pairs and a cover in its own size.
3. Submit from an inbox you will keep. Verification links and edit links arrive there, sometimes weeks after the form.
4. Put every badge where a redesign will not drop it and look for it again after each deploy.
5. Open each live listing and read the link to your site: where it points and what its rel says.

Directory submissions, done for you

Manual directory submission for a website is a form per site, and in these tables a form runs from the single URL field of FiveTaco to the six steps of SideProjectors. Bulk directory submission fills many forms from one saved profile. Done for you is the third way to handle directory submissions, and how the paid options compare is laid out on a page of its own.

Submitator is done for you. You choose the directories in our dashboard, each with its DR beside it, and from there the forms are our work: every directory gets a description written for it alone, and every badge or link back it asks for is ours to place on your site and keep live. Most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours, every directory within 21 days at most. By default a rejected submission is credited back as one more directory in your selection, so you can choose another. A refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms.

It is $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 or $79 for 100, one-time. All Directories, at $149, covers every directory in the catalog and every one added after it. The catalog table prints all 160+ in one place.