Which SaaS Directories Give You a Dofollow Link? We Checked 22

Every list of SaaS directories has a column that says "dofollow" or "nofollow". Almost none of them say where the column came from. Usually it was copied from an older list, which copied it from the directory's pricing page, which describes the plan you might buy rather than the listing you will actually get.

So we read the links themselves. On October 27, 2026 we opened 120 live listings on 22 directories, read the HTML each one serves, and recorded what the link to the listed product really is: its rel attribute, whether it passes through a redirect, whether it exists before JavaScript runs, and whether the page tells search engines to ignore its links. Where the answer changed with the plan or the rank, we read more listings, up to 45 on one site. The raw table is a CSV you can download.

We run SaaS Cubes, which is one of the 22. It was checked by the same script on the same day, and its rows are in the raw data like everyone else's.

The Results

"Followed" below means the link to the product is a real <a href> whose rel holds none of nofollow, ugc or sponsored, on a page that doesn't switch its links off. It says nothing about how much Google credits it; more on that below.

Choosing where to list is a separate question from the link: audience, fit and launch timing matter more, and our guide to SaaS directories covers that side. This post is only about what the link is.

Followed on a Free Listing

Five directories gave a followed link without a payment, most of them on a condition.

SaaS Cubes

A plain link to the product (rel="noopener", with UTM tags so the owner can see the visit) on 5 of 5 listings, in the server HTML, on pages with no robots restrictions. The free plan asks for our badge or a link on your homepage, which we check before the listing goes into review. A badge marked rel="sponsored" counts; one marked nofollow or ugc doesn't.

Fazier

Every one of the 23 launch pages we read, free, Lite and Premium, ranked first or fifty-ninth, carried two plain links to the product. That's more generous than the pricing page reads: Lite lists a "High-authority backlink for top 3 daily products", yet Lite launches far outside the top 3 had the same link. The free plan's condition is on the page too: "A backlink to our site is required (on your homepage or footer)", with review "within 30 days".

Startup Stash

rel="external noopener" on all 5, in the server HTML. external is a hint for browsers and site themes, not a value Google reads as a qualifier. Startup Stash publishes no listing price; its add-listing form asks about advertising budgets instead, and its review policy says "Money does not buy a place, a rank, or a softer limitation."

SaaSHub

The green Visit website button had an empty rel="" on all 8 verified profiles we read, including small products that aren't paying Featured customers, and rel="nofollow" on all 5 unverified ones (Notion, Linear and PostHog among them). Every other link to the product on the page is nofollow. SaaSHub doesn't state this rule anywhere we could find, so the pattern is our reading of 13 pages. Verification is one of its "free options", by company email or an HTML snippet, and verified vendors get a quarterly reminder to confirm. We didn't see what happens to the link when that lapses.

Uneed

Uneed states its rule outright: "An upvote score of 10 to stay published, 20 for the do-follow backlink." Of 32 launches from October 24 and 25, 27 had a plain link (rel="noopener") and 5 had nofollow. Some of the followed ones showed no upvotes at all, which suggests a paid launch (Fast-track, $14.99, keeps the link "from an upvote score of 10"), but the listing page doesn't show the tier.

Followed When You Pay or Win

Eight directories gave a followed link to paid listings, to some of their winners, or under a rule they don't publish.

DevHunt

The clearest rule in the test, and the site states it: "Links on free listings are nofollow; paid launches get a permanent dofollow link." A launch costs $19. All 41 paid listings we read had rel="noopener", and all 4 free ones had nofollow noopener.

TinyLaunch

Premium launches ($39) had a plain link on all 12 we read, and free launches outside the top 3 had nofollow on all 5. Free top-3 winners, whose plan lists a "High authority backlink for top 3 ranking products", split seven and seven. Six of the seven winners with the followed link show a TinyLaunch badge on their homepage (the seventh site didn't load for us); none of the seven without it do. TinyLaunch states no such rule, so that pattern is ours. Its terms add that all backlinks "are provided "as is" without guarantees."

Launching Next

Of 26 listings, 7 had a plain link and 19 were nofollow. All 7 followed ones had a long About section and none of the nofollow ones did. The site doesn't mark paid listings, so we can't tell whether that's the rule. Submitting is free, express review is "a $99 upgrade", and the promotion plans advertise "A DR 51 Dofollow backlink."

MicroLaunch

A plain link (rel="noopener noreferrer") on all 5 listings. Every dated launch in its feed was a paid one, and we found no free launch path on its public pages. The paid plans promise "Lifetime SEO" with "Do-follow Backlinks".

BetaList

The Visit Site button points at BetaList's own /startups/name/visit, which answers with a 301 to the product. The button has no rel, and BetaList's robots.txt doesn't block that path, so it's a followable route (the screenshot links to the same address carry nofollow). BetaList says so itself: the button "is a do-follow link". The catch is the price of entry: "All submissions are paid. There is no free submission option."

There's An AI For That

A plain link with no rel on all 5, claimed and Featured listings alike. But every plain request we sent got a Cloudflare challenge instead of the page, so these links come from the page after headless Chrome passed it. What Googlebot receives, we can't see. Listing starts with a "$49 one-time review fee".

Toolify

rel="dofollow" on the main links of all 5. That isn't a real rel value and does nothing, but nothing qualifies the link either. Same caveat as above: we could only read the rendered page, after a Cloudflare challenge. Listing costs $99, and the submit page promises "no less than 6 quality dofollow links from Toolify"; we didn't count them.

Futurepedia

rel="noopener noreferrer" on all 5, Sponsored or not, in the server HTML. There is no public submit page: its terms say the cost "is displayed at the time of purchase", and every tool we sampled was marked Verified.

Qualified Links: ugc, nofollow, sponsored

Five directories marked every product link we read.

Product Hunt

Every product page and launch page we read links the product with rel="noreferrer noopener ugc", #1 Product of the Day included, and the launch subpages are noindex on top of that. Launching is free ("It's 100% free to use"), and a launch day can still send real visitors. It just isn't a followed link.

Peerlist

Peerlist is explicit: "only the top 5 projects of the week are awarded a backlink." What the top 5 get is an <a> marked rel="ugc". Everyone else gets a <button> carrying an href attribute, which works as a link for a person and isn't one for a crawler. Launching is free with a verified profile.

Indie Hackers

rel="nofollow noopener" on every link to the product, on all 5 product pages, Stripe-verified products included. Free with an account.

AlternativeTo

Its FAQ answers the question before you ask it: "Usually not. Links to apps' websites are nofollow unless our editors decide otherwise, and you can't buy a followed link." Direct links were nofollow. Links routed through its /outgoing/ path were marked sponsored, and robots.txt disallows that path anyway.

SideProjectors

The server HTML holds one link to the product, marked nofollow ugc, on all 10 recent listings we read. After JavaScript runs, the app adds two more links to the same address with no rel at all. Google renders JavaScript, so which copy it weighs is anyone's guess; a crawler that doesn't run scripts sees only the nofollow one.

No Crawlable Link

On three directories, a free profile didn't link to the product in any way a crawler would follow.

SaaSworthy

No <a> to the product on any of the 6 pages, in the server HTML or after rendering. Visit Website is a <span> whose click handler opens /redir.php, a path robots.txt disallows. Pay-per-click listings take the same route plus one more hop, which answers with noindex.

Capterra

Free (Basic) profiles carried no link to the product at all, on all 4 we loaded. Capterra's transparency page says the Visit Website button belongs to sponsored profiles, "providers who pay us a referral fee for redirecting traffic to their websites". We couldn't load one of those buttons; its robots.txt disallows /ppc/clicks/ and /redirector/.

GetApp

The same owner and the same pattern: no link to the product on 3 of 3 free profiles.

The One We Couldn't Check

G2

Every listing answered HTTP 403 behind DataDome, with and without a browser, so we have nothing to report about its links. Its plans page says "CTAs not included on Free"; Starter is $299 a month.

What "Dofollow" Means, in Google's Own Words

There is no rel="dofollow". The word is SEO shorthand for an ordinary link: an <a href> whose rel attribute carries none of the three values Google reads as qualifiers. Google's documentation says it plainly: "For regular links that you expect Google to fetch and parse without any qualifications, you don't need to add a rel attribute."

Values can be combined (rel="ugc nofollow"), and none of them is a hard switch any more. When Google introduced sponsored and ugc on September 10, 2019, it said "All the link attributes, sponsored, ugc, and nofollow, now work today as hints for us to incorporate for ranking purposes," and nofollow became a hint for crawling and indexing too on March 1, 2020. In the same post Google said that in most cases it will "generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes."

So the honest summary: a qualified link probably passes nothing, a plain link may pass something, and only Google knows the weights. Bing honours the same three values. A Bing spokesperson told Search Engine Land in June 2020 that they are hints there too, and that sponsored and ugc were still "not as strong of a signal for Bing" while adoption grew.

Five Ways a Followed-Looking Link Isn't One

Reading rel is the first check, not the last. Every one of these turned up in the test:

1. A page that switches its links off. <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> in the page's head, or an X-Robots-Tag: nofollow header, means Google should "not follow the links on this page", whatever each link's own rel says. A noindex page goes the same way in time: John Mueller said in 2017 that a page left on noindex, follow is eventually treated as noindex, nofollow. Product Hunt's launch subpages are noindex.
2. A redirect crawlers may not take. Many directories send the Visit button through their own URL to count clicks. If robots.txt disallows that path, as on AlternativeTo and SaaSworthy, Googlebot never takes the hop. BetaList's /visit is the counterexample: the path is allowed and the 301 leads to the product.
3. Something that isn't a link. Peerlist's <button href>, SaaSworthy's <span> with a click handler and Capterra's missing link all look like a way to the product to a visitor. Google's guidance is that it can't reliably extract URLs from elements that only act as links through script events.
4. A link that depends on JavaScript. Google renders scripts, but in Vercel and MERJ's 2024 study none of the major AI crawlers did, Gemini aside, since it runs on Google's own crawler (we covered what that means for client-rendered apps). On SideProjectors the followed copies exist only after the script runs.
5. A tier you didn't buy. DevHunt, TinyLaunch, Uneed, SaaSHub and Peerlist all give different links to different listings. A directory-wide "dofollow" label describes one of them.

What Google Says About Directory Links

Google's spam policies define link spam as "creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings," and three examples on that list (last updated August 28, 2026) touch how directories work:

• "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links"
• "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes," which includes "Exchanging money for links" and "Exchanging goods or services for links"
• "Requiring a link as part of a Terms of Service, contract, or similar arrangement without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link"

The same section adds that "buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes," and that such links are no violation "as long as they are qualified" with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".

The third example matters if a directory asks for a link on your site before it lists you, as SaaS Cubes and Fazier do for their free plans. Ask whether it still accepts that link when you mark it rel="sponsored". Ours does; the badge requirements say which values count.

Does a Nofollow Listing Still Help?

It can, just not as a ranking signal you can count on. A listing is a page about your product that people browse, search engines crawl and AI assistants read when they look for third-party mentions, and some of those people click through. Product Hunt marks every link ugc and still sends launch-day traffic, which amplifies an audience you already have more than it creates one.

Measure it rather than guess. Most directories in this test tag the link (?ref=producthunt, ?ref=betalist, utm_source=futurepedia), and the tag matters more than it looks: links marked noreferrer send no referrer, so without it the visit lands in your analytics as Direct. Look for those tags in your referral reports a month after a listing goes live, and keep the directories that send visitors whatever their rel says.

How to Check a Directory Yourself

The same check by hand takes two minutes per directory.

How We Tested

What we checked. Every directory in our directories guide but the MCP Registry, which has no listing pages to read, makes 14. Add 8 launch and review sites founders ask us about (Fazier, Peerlist, DevHunt, TinyLaunch, SaaSworthy, Toolify, Startup Stash and SideProjectors) and that makes 22.

How. For each directory we picked 3 to 13 live listings, covering every tier the pages showed (free, paid, featured, verified, launch winners). A script fetched each listing with a desktop Chrome user agent and recorded every <a> pointing at the product's domain with its rel, the page's meta robots and X-Robots-Tag, and any redirect through the directory, followed hop by hop with a check of robots.txt for Googlebot. Headless Chrome then rendered at least one listing per directory to compare the HTML with the page after JavaScript. Where the result varied, we swept more listings: 45 on DevHunt, 32 on Uneed, 31 on TinyLaunch, 26 on Launching Next, 23 on Fazier, 19 on Peerlist and 10 on SideProjectors. Prices and stated rules come from each directory's own pages, read the same day, and we spot-checked the agents' readings by hand.

What it can't tell you. It is one day's snapshot of a few listings per site. Where a page doesn't show its plan (Uneed, Launching Next), we can't tie a link to a tier. Six sites served our scripted request a bot challenge; for There's An AI For That, Toolify, AlternativeTo, Capterra and GetApp we read the page as headless Chrome got it, which may not be what Googlebot gets, and G2 we couldn't read at all. And "followed" describes the markup, not what Google does with it.

The data. All 120 rows are in the CSV, one per listing, with the URL, the route, the rel, what the server sent and what rendered. The headline figures are also on our SaaS marketing statistics page. If you run one of these directories and something has changed since October 27, tell us and we'll check again.