DR 59, and the Link Is Nofollow. You Are Not Here for the Link.
Written by Submitator. WebCatalog is one of the directories we file customers to, an account at a time, so read it as an interested party. The link result is measured from their live pages and the footnote says exactly what was read.
WebCatalog is rated 59 by Ahrefs and it is not a directory in the sense the rest of this catalog uses the word. It is a desktop client, founded in 2020, that turns web apps into installable applications for Mac, Windows and Linux, with a catalogue running to roughly 50,000 English app pages across 30 locales.
The link question has a short answer. We read 70 English app pages, and on the 69 that carry a link to the app's own site, every single one is rel="noopener nofollow". That anchor is the only non-furniture external link on the page, so there is nothing else to measure. Three pages re-requested as Googlebot came back identical.
Their own X, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram links are followed. So are the App Store and Google Play links. The submitted app's is not. That is the correct policy for a catalogue anybody can add to, and it means the 59 on their domain has nothing to do with what your listing is worth.
Which is fine, because the listing is not a link. It is a distribution channel, and that is a better thing.
| You get | Verdict |
|---|---|
| A followed backlink | No. 69 of 69 are rel="noopener nofollow" |
| An indexed page in 30 languages | Yes, with a title and canonical on every one we read |
| Installable in their desktop client | Yes, on Mac, Windows and Linux |
| An editable listing | Only after you verify ownership |
| A verified badge and analytics | Same, via the Developer Console |
| A cost | None. "You won't be asked to pay at any point" |
"Once approved, it joins the catalog where people discover and install apps on Mac, Windows, and Linux." That is what you are buying with ninety seconds of form filling, and it is not a backlink. It is your product becoming installable from inside a piece of software somebody already pays $5 or $8 a month for. Nothing else on any submission list in this catalog does that, which is why a nofollow entry stays in ours.
WebCatalog at a glance
| What you get | WebCatalog |
|---|---|
| Price to list | $0, "no premium tier to unlock" |
| The link | rel="noopener nofollow" on 69 of 69 |
| Domain Rating | 59 (Ahrefs), and no equity passed |
| The form | App name and app URL, account required |
| What a listing does | Makes the app installable on Mac, Windows, Linux |
| Languages | 30 locales, each with its own page |
| Ownership verification | Edit the page, verified badge, analytics |
| Catalogue | ~50,000 English app pages |
| Page quality | Title, canonical and no noindex on all read |
| Filed for you by Submitator | An account per customer, plus 29 more directories from $29 |
Per webcatalog.io, its /en/developers/app-listing, /en/advertise, /pricing and /about pages, robots.txt and sitemaps, all read on 22 September 2026. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' figure via submitator.com/domain-rating-checker, which returned 59. Their robots.txt allows everything except /cdn-cgi/ and points at a sitemap index at /sitemaps/index.xml, which lists 1,627 child sitemaps of which 1,310 cover apps. Three of those app sitemaps were sampled and each held roughly 2,900 URLs spanning 30 locales, of which about 50 were English app pages; the figure of roughly 50,000 English app pages is an extrapolation from that sample and is given as an order of magnitude rather than a count. The link finding is a sample: 70 English app pages drawn at random with a fixed seed from a pool of 197 collected across four app sitemaps, each fetched successfully, with anchors located by regex on the anchor element rather than by an HTML parser. WebCatalog's own social accounts, its App Store and Google Play links, its media kit and its trust centre appear on every page and were excluded as furniture by hostname before attribution. That leaves exactly one non-furniture external anchor per page, the link to the app's own site, present on 69 of the 70 and carrying rel="noopener nofollow" on all 69, with no other rel value appearing anywhere in the sample. Three pages were then re-requested with a Googlebot user agent and returned the same rel. All 70 pages carry a title element and a self-referencing canonical, and none carries a robots noindex. Quoted lines are taken verbatim from their pages: "Once approved, it joins the catalog where people discover and install apps on Mac, Windows, and Linux", "Sign in, then enter the app's name and URL. That's it.", "Free and fast. No fees and no paid plan", "Verify ownership to edit your app page, get a verified badge, and see analytics", "Is it free to list an app? Yes, completely. You won't be asked to pay at any point, and there's no premium tier to unlock", and from the submission form "No pirated contents, pornography or hate speech are accepted" and "We will review and add the app to the catalog as soon as possible." Their desktop product is priced separately at $5 and $8 per user per month and they sell advertising through a contact-sales page with no published rate; neither affects a listing. They publish no review window; the observation that approval is often same-day is our own experience filing these for customers rather than a commitment they make, and Submitator's terms state an aim of 2 to 3 days and a committed ETA of 30 days from purchase, so this page makes no speed comparison in either direction. Nothing was submitted in the course of this review and no ownership was verified, so the verification flow, the analytics it exposes and the review bar are outside what we can report beyond their published wording. Submitator files customers to WebCatalog using an account per customer. Our plans are $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, one-time, chosen by you with each Domain Rating shown and no-equity marked where it applies, badges installed and kept live, rejections credited back as +1 directory and a 30-day refund policy on the conditions in our terms.
How to list your app on WebCatalog, step by step
- 1
Make the account yours, not a shared one
Signing in is required, and the account you use is the one that can later claim the listing. We create a separate account per customer for exactly this reason. A shared submission account gets the app listed and then makes ownership verification somebody else's to do, which quietly forfeits the editing, the badge and the analytics.
- 2
Send the canonical app URL, not a marketing page
The form takes an app name and an app URL and nothing else. Their product wraps the address you give into a desktop app, so give the URL a user should land on when they open it: the app itself, or the login screen if there is one. A pricing page or a campaign landing page makes a desktop app that opens on your pricing page.
- 3
Check you are on the right side of their one rule
The form carries a single content line: "No pirated contents, pornography or hate speech are accepted." That is the whole editorial bar, and their FAQ confirms you do not have to be the developer to submit an app. Everything else comes down to whether it is genuinely a web app, because there is nothing for their client to wrap otherwise.
- 4
Come back and verify ownership, because almost nobody does
This is the step with the actual value in it, and it is separate from submitting. Their developer page lists what it unlocks: "Verify ownership to edit your app page, get a verified badge, and see analytics." Ten minutes in their Developer Console turns a listing somebody else wrote into a page you control, with numbers attached.
- 5
Then write the page properly, in one language
Once you can edit, the description you write is the one that propagates. Their catalogue runs in 30 locales and each app has its own page in each, so the copy is worth more here than on a directory with one page. Write it as a product description rather than a pitch, because the reader is deciding whether to install it, not whether to click.
- 6
Do not put it in the backlink column
Every app link we measured is nofollow, so nothing from this belongs in a tally of the links a campaign produced. Put it in the distribution column instead, next to app stores and extension marketplaces, and judge it on installs rather than on Domain Rating.
Sixty-nine of sixty-nine, and nothing else on the page
This was an unusually clean measurement because there is so little to measure. Strip out WebCatalog's own furniture, which appears identically on every page, being their X, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram accounts, their media kit, their trust centre and the App Store and Google Play links, and exactly one external anchor remains: the app's own website.
It was present on 69 of the 70 pages we read and carried rel="noopener nofollow" on all 69. Not one exception, not one other rel value anywhere in the sample, and the same answer when we asked as Googlebot. The pages themselves are properly built, with a title and a self-referencing canonical on all seventy and not a single noindex, which is more than several sites in this catalog can say.
So this is the Indie Hackers situation again: a strong domain attached to a link that passes nothing. Our catalog card prints the 59 and a no-equity mark side by side, which is what the mark is for.
The reason to file it anyway
Nothing else on a submission list does what this does. WebCatalog sells a desktop client with a free tier and paid plans at $5 and $8 per user per month, and the catalogue is what that client installs from. Being listed means somebody using their product can turn your web app into a desktop app on their machine without you shipping anything.
Their own framing of that is the most useful sentence on their developer page: "No code required. Your app stays as it is. Nothing to build, ship, or maintain." For a web product with no desktop story, that is a distribution surface acquired for ninety seconds of form filling and no engineering, which is a category of thing worth having even when the link attached to it is worth nothing.
They also publish, in their own FAQ, the sentence most directories avoid: "Is it free to list an app? Yes, completely. You won't be asked to pay at any point, and there's no premium tier to unlock." They sell advertising separately, through a contact-sales page with no published rate, and it does not touch the listing.
The step most people skip
Submitting an app and owning its listing are two different actions here, and the second one is optional, free, and where the value is. Their developer page names what verification unlocks in one line: "Verify ownership to edit your app page, get a verified badge, and see analytics."
Edit the page, and the description stops being whatever a reviewer wrote from your homepage and becomes yours, in a catalogue that renders it across thirty locales. Get the badge, and the listing says the company stands behind it. See the analytics, and you find out whether any of this produced installs, which is the only number that matters on a nofollow listing.
It is also the reason we create a separate account per customer rather than filing everything from one. An app submitted from a shared account is an app somebody else would have to hand over before you could claim it. Filed from your own, verification is a ten-minute job you can do whenever you like.
WebCatalog review: the short answer
Free, two fields and an account, DR 59, and a nofollow link on every listing we measured. File it for the distribution rather than the equity, use an account you control, and go back and verify ownership.
WebCatalog is free. Thirty directories are $29, each one measured.
One payment, every directory named in your dashboard with its Domain Rating on the card, a no-equity mark where the link passes nothing, badges installed and kept live where one is wanted, and a rejection credited back as another directory of your choice.
A nofollow listing worth filing anyway.
WebCatalog is DR 59 and every app link we measured is rel="noopener nofollow", 69 of 69, the same under Googlebot. File it anyway, because a listing makes your web app installable as a desktop app on Mac, Windows and Linux from inside a product people pay for. Free, two fields, an account you should own, and then go back and verify ownership for the edit rights, the badge and the analytics. The whole catalog.
FAQ
Is a WebCatalog link dofollow?
No. We read 70 English app pages and on the 69 that carry a link to the app's own site, every one is rel="noopener nofollow". That is the only non-furniture external anchor on an app page, so there is nothing else to measure. Three pages re-requested with a Googlebot user agent returned the same value. WebCatalog's own social links and the App Store and Google Play links are followed; the submitted app's is not.
Then why submit to WebCatalog at all?
Because the listing is distribution rather than a backlink. WebCatalog is a desktop client that turns web apps into installable apps for Mac, Windows and Linux, and their developer page is exact about what a listing does: “Once approved, it joins the catalog where people discover and install apps on Mac, Windows, and Linux.” Your product becomes something a user installs from inside a product they already pay for, which is a different thing from a row in a directory.
What is WebCatalog's Domain Rating?
59, per Ahrefs, which is high for this catalog and irrelevant to what you get. Every app link is nofollow, so the 59 describes their domain rather than your listing. Our catalog card prints the 59 and a no-equity mark beside it, for exactly this reason.
Is WebCatalog free to list on?
Yes, and they are unusually direct about it. Their FAQ reads “Is it free to list an app? Yes, completely. You won't be asked to pay at any point, and there's no premium tier to unlock.” They do sell advertising separately through a contact-sales page, and a paid desktop plan at $5 and $8 per user per month, but neither touches the listing.
Do you need an account to submit to WebCatalog?
Yes. That is the one piece of friction in the flow and the reason it is worth doing properly: their step one is “Sign in, then enter the app's name and URL. That's it.” The form itself is two fields, an app name and an app URL, with a note that pirated content, pornography and hate speech are not accepted.
What does verifying ownership on WebCatalog get you?
Three things their developer page names: the ability to edit your app page, a verified badge on the listing, and analytics. It is a separate step from submitting and most submitters never take it, which makes it the highest-value ten minutes available here. Verification happens through their Developer Console.
How long does WebCatalog take to approve an app?
They publish no window. Filing these for customers, our own experience is that approval is usually quick and often lands the same day, which is our observation rather than a service level they commit to. Their own wording is “We will review and add the app to the catalog as soon as possible.”
How big is the WebCatalog catalogue?
Very. Their sitemap index lists 1,627 child sitemaps of which 1,310 cover apps, each holding roughly 50 English app pages across 30 locales, which puts the catalogue in the region of 50,000 English app pages. Bigger apps also get an /alternatives page. Every page we read carried a title, a canonical and no noindex, so the pages themselves are properly built.
Which apps will WebCatalog not list?
Their submission form states it in one line: “No pirated contents, pornography or hate speech are accepted.” Beyond that the bar is whether it is a real web app, since the whole product exists to wrap web apps as desktop ones. Their FAQ also confirms you do not have to be the developer to submit something.
Does Submitator submit to WebCatalog?
Yes, with an account created per customer rather than a shared one, which is how their flow expects it to work and what makes the ownership-verification step possible afterwards. The catalog card carries a no-equity mark next to the Domain Rating because of what 69 of 69 links measured, and a rejection comes back as a credit for another directory of your choice.
More submit-to guides.
WebCatalog is free. Thirty directories are $29, each one measured.
One payment, each directory named with its Domain Rating on the card before you choose it, a no-equity mark where the link passes nothing, badges installed and kept live where one is wanted, and a rejection swapped for another directory.