I built BetaList 16 years ago which was one of the first "product discovery" platforms. Years before Product Hunt, etc.
I manually reviewed every submission and unfortunately often I had to tell founders that their startup didn't qualify to be included. Almost everyone would (understandably!) argue their case, but as volume increased I couldn't afford to go into a deep argument with every single founder.
That's when I made https://submit.co a site similar to OP's. The idea being that instead of say "No, we will not feature your startup" I now gave them an alternative place to put their energy.
Initially it was mostly a list of tech blogs, but as more product discovery platforms popped up, I started adding them too. In a sense, I was promoting my competition but it was exactly the startups we couldn't list any way for one reason or another.
Eventually that list of "places to submit your startup" got so popular (and copied everywhere ) that it started driving traffic back to BetaList. (I included it at the very top of the list).
Thanks for helping us launch LocalXpose however many years ago. I know it seems like product promotion is (rightfully) something to always be wary of, but I appreciate the forums you’ve provided startups hoping to find early adopters. We are (relatively speaking) successful nobodies, but I wonder if you have any memories of sites that “blew up” after being added on BetaList?
At listennotes.com , we have to delete tons of fake podcasts submitted to our site [1]
why do people create fake podcasts? they want to get backlinks from all podcast directories
podcasts are distributed via rss feed. and spammers/"growth hackers" put tons of links in the rss feed.
and podcast hosting services (especially those allow free trials, e.g., rss.com, ) could help them one-click to distribute to a bunch of podcast apps / websites
most podcast websites / apps don't delete fake podcasts like we do at listennotes.com . so i guess the backlink hack w/ fake podcasts works. real human podcast listeners might suffer with spammy fake shows even on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
What’s old is new again. In the 90s we used services like Submit It to get an URL into all the crawlers and indices. Now the search engines aren’t the challenge, it’s the sites targeting specific audiences.
Speaking of StumbleUpon, I'm not sure whether this was just luck or something about its recommendation algorithm/social graph, but it was the only service where I didn't see the usual flood of traffic followed by rapid decay, the classic Slashdot/HN effect. The curve felt much smoother.
I remember some bloggers at the time describing the same thing [1].
We used StumbleUpon to visit interesting sites we wouldn’t otherwise find. It didn’t exist to keep you deeply engaged with a main StumbleUpon website.
The aggregators are meant to be the destination. The links are more like shiny dangling lures. Some of them (reddit) do everything they can to keep you from having a reason to leave the page at all.
So I suppose it would follow that one gets people engaged in your site, while the other kinda tries to keep them from doing that.
While i appreciate that there are websites where you can list your website, compiling them in a publicly available list is a recipe for spam.
Rather than post links to your websites on these websites, you need to share your website with your community. Imagine never using HN and then posting a show HN. You'll probably quickly get your domain banned.
When you are part of a website community, it's much easier to understand what kind of things you should post, as opposed to just drive-by posting everywhere.
The audience for these listings are people trying to take shortcuts.
More than 3 decades. The original world wide web had them. Link "circles"[1] fell out of favor for SEO around 2015 or so, but before that, they had been a primary driver of Page Rank forever.
I worked in SEO from 2008 until 2015, and developed a lot of tools for increasing your PR from backlink indexing, to running a 15k domain blog network designed to build links to links to links to you, and my favorite: Click Faker - if you were ranked on Google already, on Page one or 2, it would search google find your site, click into it, navigate around, sit on some pages for a while before clicking an exit link or closing the browser - it was very powerful, but nearly impossible to scale, since it needed local residential IPs and I'm against botnets.
1. The circles actually couldn't close if you were looking for the ultimate page rank passthrough, they were actually a line, but still called circles.
I have been maintaining my own metalist of directories where one can submit their indie/personal websites to. In alphabetical order, here is what it looks like right now:
A clarification: The Wander link above (which I developed) is not something where you list your website. It is a tool you host on your website to become part of a decentralised network of personal websites (much like in a webring, except that the network is shaped like a graph rather than a ring): https://susam.codeberg.page/wcn/. More details here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander
The directories have to assume everyone is doing it for personal benefit. That's one of their main hooks to gather submissions, and they have to deal with the spam of bad actors.
If your website is a good quality addition to the lists, just submit it. Your exact motivation isn't really relevant if the qualifier holds.
Submission is broken or doesn't provide any user feedback on error. I've tapped submit 3x, but nothing changes. I have no confirmation that my submission had been received or whether there's an issue.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but backlinks has never been less important for SEO than they are right now.
Google has slowly de-prioritized them as a ranking signal over time due to the constant abuse, the death of the blogosphere (the vast majority of websites are now corporate blogspam with few legitimate organic links), and the fact that every major social platform now de-ranks posts with external links in them (to keep people on-site).
And as far as I know the crawlers in LLMs don't use backlinks as a signal at all.
boosting DR rating is the biggest psyop of indie hackers: it's temporal and has zero effect on anything. All my websites are 3 to 6 DR points. https://mdview.io has 5 DR and brings in 500 uniq users per day organically
Since search engines are going to be replaced by AI, is there now potential for old school hand curated web directories like we had in the late 1900s to surface again?
Lists of websites hand curated by categories and topics, and even certified to have AI free content, could be cool.
Hmm, the top item on the page is Medium, and underneath the description begins with "High-authority publishing platform".
That is... not the popular assessment of Medium these days. At one point, Medium and the other minimalist one whose name I can't remember (edit: it was Svbtle) were seen as high-prestige and high-signal platforms.
Nowadays Medium is just AI slop and low-effort surface-level takes from people trying to build a personal brand.
The initial appeal of Medium and Svbtle, which was the other one I was thinking of, was that almost any time you saw an article from them it was usually high-quality. With their simplistic dark-on-light themes they looked visually distinct (especially Svbtle) from the popular blogging platforms at the time. There were no ads, no calls to action, no fucking modal "you need an account to keep reading" popups, etc. I seem to recall that Svbtle and Medium both began as invite-only, so the set of authors was highly curated.
Thus, the reading experience was fantastic.
As soon as they opened up to everyone, almost right away the quality dropped. All of a sudden Medium in particular was chock full of shallow "man page disguised as a blog post" posts and "tutorials" from people trying to build their own personal brands. It became a firehose of mediocrity.
Substack is currently experiencing the same cycle.
Ultimately I think, if you want to preserve the elite/luxury/exclusivity reputation, you need to impose artificial scarcity and resist the urge to "hyperscale" or whatever.
I hate how medium articles keep showing up at top of my search results. I googled a coding problem. First link was a medium tutorial. I click and mid way, it's asking me to sign up to read more. Ugh. I sign up and then it wants me to go through a few pages of topics I'd like to choose and what not. Then I finally end up at the tutorial I was trying to read and it's blocked behind a pay wall. Wtf.
I am not within the SEO world so I can't answer this question, sorry but I recommend asking it to other people or if other people can answer it.
My naive interpretation would be to build tools which other companies want to use but its a bit of chicken and egg problem and maybe these directories help in fixing the issue in the first place of this problem.
Also, with LLM's, I imagine that there are some websites which use AI for writing texts but the thing is that I'd much prefer my things to not be mentioned by them even if it increases the SEO because I'd prefer not my product if I build one when searched to be filled with slop results, and also, everyone is within the rush for gold mines and so we are forgetting writing for the sake of it but there are few people who write blogs for the sake of writing.
Perhaps I recommend looking at some blogging websites and asking them to test your website but this isn't company blog. I think that is a high bar to achieve but I wish you look in doing so and hope someone who's more experienced in SEO can answer it for ya.
Fun story:
I built BetaList 16 years ago which was one of the first "product discovery" platforms. Years before Product Hunt, etc.
I manually reviewed every submission and unfortunately often I had to tell founders that their startup didn't qualify to be included. Almost everyone would (understandably!) argue their case, but as volume increased I couldn't afford to go into a deep argument with every single founder.
That's when I made https://submit.co a site similar to OP's. The idea being that instead of say "No, we will not feature your startup" I now gave them an alternative place to put their energy.
Initially it was mostly a list of tech blogs, but as more product discovery platforms popped up, I started adding them too. In a sense, I was promoting my competition but it was exactly the startups we couldn't list any way for one reason or another.
Eventually that list of "places to submit your startup" got so popular (and copied everywhere ) that it started driving traffic back to BetaList. (I included it at the very top of the list).
For the ones that don’t have a submit button, what have you found are the best ways to get featured?
I know some are pay to play but curious if there are other methods you’ve found effective.
Thanks for helping us launch LocalXpose however many years ago. I know it seems like product promotion is (rightfully) something to always be wary of, but I appreciate the forums you’ve provided startups hoping to find early adopters. We are (relatively speaking) successful nobodies, but I wonder if you have any memories of sites that “blew up” after being added on BetaList?
At listennotes.com , we have to delete tons of fake podcasts submitted to our site [1]
why do people create fake podcasts? they want to get backlinks from all podcast directories
podcasts are distributed via rss feed. and spammers/"growth hackers" put tons of links in the rss feed.
and podcast hosting services (especially those allow free trials, e.g., rss.com, ) could help them one-click to distribute to a bunch of podcast apps / websites
any examples? here you go -
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=UU88%20
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=%E6%B6%A8%E7%B2%89
* https://open.spotify.com/search/%E6%B6%A8%E7%B2%89/podcasts
most podcast websites / apps don't delete fake podcasts like we do at listennotes.com . so i guess the backlink hack w/ fake podcasts works. real human podcast listeners might suffer with spammy fake shows even on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
[1] https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
What’s old is new again. In the 90s we used services like Submit It to get an URL into all the crawlers and indices. Now the search engines aren’t the challenge, it’s the sites targeting specific audiences.
Was that creaking sound your knee or mine?
Hard to say, drkoop.com is a landing page now
Ha, a new/old webring. If you are reading this and know what that is, it's time for your prostate/mammogram check-up.
Haha or colonoscopy.
And don't forget StumbleUpon...
Delicious!
Speaking of StumbleUpon, I'm not sure whether this was just luck or something about its recommendation algorithm/social graph, but it was the only service where I didn't see the usual flood of traffic followed by rapid decay, the classic Slashdot/HN effect. The curve felt much smoother.
I remember some bloggers at the time describing the same thing [1].
I'd be curious if anyone knows more details.
[1] https://mark.blog/2007/10/23/the-stumbleupon-effect/
I can see how that kinda makes sense.
We used StumbleUpon to visit interesting sites we wouldn’t otherwise find. It didn’t exist to keep you deeply engaged with a main StumbleUpon website.
The aggregators are meant to be the destination. The links are more like shiny dangling lures. Some of them (reddit) do everything they can to keep you from having a reason to leave the page at all.
So I suppose it would follow that one gets people engaged in your site, while the other kinda tries to keep them from doing that.
Kinda reminds me of DMoz.
Curlie is the successor to DMOZ: https://curlie.org/docs/en/about.html
But Curlie doesn't appear in the website linked in the parent post.
itsbeen84years.gif
Dmoz! Those were the good days. :-)
> Now the search engines aren’t the challenge
Although it can still be a gamble whether a small site made it to DuckDuckGo (Bing’s crawler)
But that only affects about seven of us anyway so your point stands
> Submit It
Trying to remember a different one…
ya i cant believe im seeing this again
While i appreciate that there are websites where you can list your website, compiling them in a publicly available list is a recipe for spam.
Rather than post links to your websites on these websites, you need to share your website with your community. Imagine never using HN and then posting a show HN. You'll probably quickly get your domain banned.
When you are part of a website community, it's much easier to understand what kind of things you should post, as opposed to just drive-by posting everywhere.
The audience for these listings are people trying to take shortcuts.
> Imagine never using HN and then posting a show HN.
There's three green accounts on the front page of /show right now
Website catalogues exist for more than a decade. They were one of the first attempts at gaming SEO.
More than 3 decades. The original world wide web had them. Link "circles"[1] fell out of favor for SEO around 2015 or so, but before that, they had been a primary driver of Page Rank forever.
I worked in SEO from 2008 until 2015, and developed a lot of tools for increasing your PR from backlink indexing, to running a 15k domain blog network designed to build links to links to links to you, and my favorite: Click Faker - if you were ranked on Google already, on Page one or 2, it would search google find your site, click into it, navigate around, sit on some pages for a while before clicking an exit link or closing the browser - it was very powerful, but nearly impossible to scale, since it needed local residential IPs and I'm against botnets.
1. The circles actually couldn't close if you were looking for the ultimate page rank passthrough, they were actually a line, but still called circles.
why would I get banned for showing my stuff?
How long does someone need to join the community before it's not a drive by? 3 hours? 3 days? 3 weeks? 3 months? 3 years?
I'd really like a website that submits your website to websites that lists websites that lists websites to submit your website to.
It could be a cousin to Wikipedia's List of Lists of Lists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
This is one of my all time fav pages. Not kidding
Sounds more fun than a recipe site.
Post another to HN, and it’s a good start…
I have been maintaining my own metalist of directories where one can submit their indie/personal websites to. In alphabetical order, here is what it looks like right now:
https://blogroll.org/
https://blogs.hn/ (by @surprisetalk)
https://hnpwd.github.io/ (I am one of the maintainers)
https://iii.social/ (by @freshman_dev)
https://indieblog.page/ (by @splitbrain)
https://kagi.com/smallweb/ (by @freediver)
https://marginalia-search.com/ (by @marginalia_nu)
https://minifeed.net/ (by @freetonik)
https://susam.net/wander/ (I developed this)
https://text.blogosphere.app/ (by @ramkarthikk)
https://wiby.me/
A clarification: The Wander link above (which I developed) is not something where you list your website. It is a tool you host on your website to become part of a decentralised network of personal websites (much like in a webring, except that the network is shaped like a graph rather than a ring): https://susam.codeberg.page/wcn/. More details here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander
Nice! Just added your comment to my list of Perl script-inspired lists
FMHY (Free Media Heck Yeah) is my favorite website directory.
It has steadily grown far beyond just sharing free media and has everything from free AI and free education to free cooking websites.
It's probably a significant contributor to the recent return of piracy giving users constantly up to date and safe resources.
Website: https://fmhy.net
Github: https://github.com/fmhy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
...recursion?!
Here's a much larger list (1,057 sites): https://pastes.io/rcPg2RLC
> earn quality backlinks
Well, at least its honest. For many (most?) of the listed sites, drive-by submitting a link just for the SEO juice would be considered rude.
The directories have to assume everyone is doing it for personal benefit. That's one of their main hooks to gather submissions, and they have to deal with the spam of bad actors.
If your website is a good quality addition to the lists, just submit it. Your exact motivation isn't really relevant if the qualifier holds.
Submission is broken or doesn't provide any user feedback on error. I've tapped submit 3x, but nothing changes. I have no confirmation that my submission had been received or whether there's an issue.
Reminds me of HotScripts, which is still around for anyone looking for nostalgia: https://www.hotscripts.com/category/scripts/php/scripts-prog...
Site logo is a bad UX idea.
It should be called Ouroboros ;-)
Let's just bring back web rings
At-least implement the submission form instead of redirecting to email the submission, lol!
I demand a submission directory of submission directories!!! :)
Post once, read never
Yo Dawg...
"X are Y but Z is real." Closed tab.
If you’re building open-source, I have a directory you can also submit your product on:
opensource.builders
brings me back, man
I remember sitting there submitting my geocities website to every search engine and website that would accept it under the sun
good times
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but backlinks has never been less important for SEO than they are right now.
Google has slowly de-prioritized them as a ranking signal over time due to the constant abuse, the death of the blogosphere (the vast majority of websites are now corporate blogspam with few legitimate organic links), and the fact that every major social platform now de-ranks posts with external links in them (to keep people on-site).
And as far as I know the crawlers in LLMs don't use backlinks as a signal at all.
Does it list itself?
boosting DR rating is the biggest psyop of indie hackers: it's temporal and has zero effect on anything. All my websites are 3 to 6 DR points. https://mdview.io has 5 DR and brings in 500 uniq users per day organically
I really like the website
Since search engines are going to be replaced by AI, is there now potential for old school hand curated web directories like we had in the late 1900s to surface again?
Lists of websites hand curated by categories and topics, and even certified to have AI free content, could be cool.
No one takes g2 and product hunt seriously right?
Hmm, the top item on the page is Medium, and underneath the description begins with "High-authority publishing platform".
That is... not the popular assessment of Medium these days. At one point, Medium and the other minimalist one whose name I can't remember (edit: it was Svbtle) were seen as high-prestige and high-signal platforms.
Nowadays Medium is just AI slop and low-effort surface-level takes from people trying to build a personal brand.
I'm building something that's not very far from how you describe (and how I also used to see) Medium.
What do you think could have prevented its downfall?
The initial appeal of Medium and Svbtle, which was the other one I was thinking of, was that almost any time you saw an article from them it was usually high-quality. With their simplistic dark-on-light themes they looked visually distinct (especially Svbtle) from the popular blogging platforms at the time. There were no ads, no calls to action, no fucking modal "you need an account to keep reading" popups, etc. I seem to recall that Svbtle and Medium both began as invite-only, so the set of authors was highly curated.
Thus, the reading experience was fantastic.
As soon as they opened up to everyone, almost right away the quality dropped. All of a sudden Medium in particular was chock full of shallow "man page disguised as a blog post" posts and "tutorials" from people trying to build their own personal brands. It became a firehose of mediocrity.
Substack is currently experiencing the same cycle.
Ultimately I think, if you want to preserve the elite/luxury/exclusivity reputation, you need to impose artificial scarcity and resist the urge to "hyperscale" or whatever.
I hate how medium articles keep showing up at top of my search results. I googled a coding problem. First link was a medium tutorial. I click and mid way, it's asking me to sign up to read more. Ugh. I sign up and then it wants me to go through a few pages of topics I'd like to choose and what not. Then I finally end up at the tutorial I was trying to read and it's blocked behind a pay wall. Wtf.
great, now i need a skill to do it on my behalf
For anyone curious about what all the links are, here are all the 50 websites that the directory links to.
1. Medium : https://medium.com
2. Crunchbase : https://crunchbase.com
3. Hacker News : https://news.ycombinator.com
4. Product Hunt : https://producthunt.com
5. Reddit r/SideProject : https://reddit.com
6. Slashdot : https://slashdot.org
7. G2 : https://g2.com
8. Awwwards : https://awwwards.com
9. Capterra : https://capterra.com
10. Dev.to : https://dev.to
11. AlternativeTo : https://alternativeto.net
12. HackerNoon : https://hackernoon.com
13. GetApp : https://getapp.com
14. Software Advice : https://softwareadvice.com
15. Designer News : https://designernews.co
16. F6S : https://f6s.com
17. Indie Hackers : https://indiehackers.com
18. One Page Love : https://onepagelove.com
19. StackShare : https://stackshare.io
20. Hashnode : https://hashnode.com
21. There's An AI For That : https://theresanaiforthat.com
22. Land-book : https://land-book.com
23. BetaList : https://betalist.com
24. Futurepedia : https://futurepedia.io
25. Lobsters : https://lobste.rs
26. Peerlist : https://peerlist.io
27. Futuretools : https://futuretools.io
28. Startup Stash : https://startupstash.com
29. Toolify : https://toolify.ai
30. Httpster : https://httpster.net
31. SaaSHub : https://saashub.com
32. Sidebar : https://sidebar.io
33. Tekpon : https://tekpon.com
34. AllTopStartups : https://alltopstartups.com
35. SaaSworthy : https://saasworthy.com
36. SaaS Landing Page : https://saaslandingpage.com
37. Betapage : https://betapage.co
38. Launching Next : https://launchingnext.com
39. DevHunt : https://devhunt.org
40. Insidr AI : https://insidr.ai
41. SideProjectors : https://sideprojectors.com
42. Startup Fame : https://startupfa.me
43. StartupBase : https://startupbase.io
44. Uneed : https://uneed.best
45. SaaS AI Tools : https://saasaitools.com
46. AngelList : https://angel.co
47. GitHub Trending : https://github.com/trending
48. Dribbble : https://dribbble.com
49. Behance : https://behance.net
50. TechCrunch : https://techcrunch.com
how can you make it so the blog of another company mentions your website so you get better SEO ?
I am not within the SEO world so I can't answer this question, sorry but I recommend asking it to other people or if other people can answer it.
My naive interpretation would be to build tools which other companies want to use but its a bit of chicken and egg problem and maybe these directories help in fixing the issue in the first place of this problem.
Also, with LLM's, I imagine that there are some websites which use AI for writing texts but the thing is that I'd much prefer my things to not be mentioned by them even if it increases the SEO because I'd prefer not my product if I build one when searched to be filled with slop results, and also, everyone is within the rush for gold mines and so we are forgetting writing for the sake of it but there are few people who write blogs for the sake of writing.
Perhaps I recommend looking at some blogging websites and asking them to test your website but this isn't company blog. I think that is a high bar to achieve but I wish you look in doing so and hope someone who's more experienced in SEO can answer it for ya.