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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
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/
Dmoz! Those were the good days. :-)
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…
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.
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.
opensource.builders
I remember sitting there submitting my geocities website to every search engine and website that would accept it under the sun
good times
Lists of websites hand curated by categories and topics, and even certified to have AI free content, could be cool.
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.
What do you think could have prevented its downfall?
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.
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
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.