Do App Directories Help SEO? What Links Actually Do

Mostly not in the way people hope. Most app and startup directories publish outbound links with rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc", and Google's own documentation says links marked that way will generally not be followed, so the link on its own is unlikely to move your rankings. What a good listing can do is send real people to your app, put your product name on a page that gets crawled and shown for brand searches, and occasionally get you in front of someone who links to you for their own reasons. That means the useful question is not "does this directory pass link equity", it is "did anyone arrive from it and did they do anything". Both answers are gettable: ten seconds in your browser tells you what kind of link you got, and one tagged URL plus 30 days of analytics tells you whether the listing earned its place.

Almost everything written about this question is published by someone with a stake in the answer. Agencies that sell link building want directories to matter. Submission services that charge to post you to 200 sites want them to matter a lot. Launch platforms that want your traffic sometimes argue the opposite so their own board looks like the only serious option. We run a small showcase for indie apps, so we are on that list too. The way out is not to trust anyone's verdict, including ours. Run the check yourself.

What kind of link do most directories actually give you?

Three link types cover nearly every listing you will ever get.

Followed links carry no qualifying attribute. The directory is vouching for the destination in the normal way the web has always worked. These are less common on open-submission sites for an obvious reason: anything anyone can submit is something spammers will submit.

Nofollowed links carry rel="nofollow". Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links describes this as the general purpose value to use "when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site". The same page notes these are treated as hints rather than hard rules, and that a page can still be discovered by other routes, but you should plan as if the link is inert for ranking purposes.

UGC links carry rel="ugc". Google recommends this value for user generated content such as comments and forum posts. Any site where users submit their own entries is a natural fit, which is why so many directories use it.

Sponsored links carry rel="sponsored". That is the value Google asks for on advertisements and paid placements. If you buy a featured slot anywhere and the link is not marked sponsored or nofollow, the directory is technically out of line with Google's link spam policies, which name "buying or selling links for ranking purposes" and "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as link spam. Directories that are careless here are not doing you a favour, they are creating a pattern you did not ask for.

For the record, so you can check us the same way: listings on this site link out to your app with rel="noopener" and nothing else, which makes them followed links. That is a fact about our markup, not a promise about your rankings. A single link from a small showcase is not going to reorder a search results page, and any site telling you otherwise is selling.

How do you check a directory's links yourself?

You do not need a paid SEO tool for this. You need a browser and about ten seconds.

1. Open any live listing on the directory, ideally somebody else's app rather than a demo page.
2. Right click the link that points at the app's website. Choose Inspect in Chrome, Edge or Brave, or Inspect Element in Firefox or Safari with developer tools enabled.
3. The elements panel opens with that <a> tag highlighted. Read the rel attribute on it.
4. If you see nofollow, ugc or sponsored, the link is qualified and you should assume it does nothing for rankings. If there is no rel, or only noopener and noreferrer, it is a followed link.

Two things that trip people up. First, check the listing page, not the homepage or the category grid, because plenty of sites nofollow their grids and follow their detail pages, or the reverse. Second, check the actual destination: some directories route outbound clicks through a redirect on their own domain, which you will see in the href before you ever look at the rel. A redirect through a tracker is not automatically bad, but it is not the same as a link to you.

If you would rather not open developer tools, view source on the listing page and search the raw HTML for your domain. Same information, no panel to learn.

Do this once per directory, before you spend an hour filling in a submission form. It will not tell you whether the listing is worth doing. It will tell you to stop expecting a ranking change, which is most of what goes wrong with this whole category.

What are directory listings genuinely good for?

Strip out the ranking story and there is still something left. Just be honest about which parts are real.

People who came to look for new apps. A directory with an actual audience sends visitors who arrived in a browsing mood rather than a buying mood, which is a fine audience for a free or freemium product and a poor one for an enterprise sales page. This is the only benefit worth chasing, and it is the one you can measure.

Brand search presence. Once a few listing pages exist for your app name, someone who half remembers it can find you again. That is not link equity, it is coverage, and it matters most for a product nobody has heard of yet.

A staging post for real links. Writers, newsletter editors and other builders sometimes browse directories looking for something to write about. The link that follows from that is an editorial link, and it is worth more than the listing that started it.

A forcing function on your assets. Filling in a serious submission form makes you write the tagline and description you have been avoiding. That is genuinely useful, and it is the reason we published an app directory submission checklist covering the asset pack most forms ask for.

And plainly, so it is on the record: plenty of directories are worth nothing at all. If a site accepts every submission instantly, has no visible traffic, and exists mainly to sell you an upgrade, the listing will not send you a single person. You do not need to feel clever about spotting those, you just need to stop giving them an hour.

How do you measure a listing without guessing?

Here is the protocol. Four steps, and the only tool involved is the analytics you already have.

Step 1. Tag the URL before you submit it. Do not paste your bare homepage into the submission form. Paste a tagged version. Google Analytics documents the campaign parameters and says to always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign when you tag a URL, and it provides a Campaign URL Builder so you do not have to assemble them by hand. For a directory listing, use one consistent scheme across every submission:

https://yourapp.com/?utm_source=trymy&utm_medium=directory&utm_campaign=listings

Change only utm_source, to the directory's name, each time. Keep utm_medium=directory identical everywhere, because that is what lets you compare directories against each other in one report later. Write the exact URL you submitted into a plain spreadsheet next to the directory name and the date, along with the rel value you found in the previous section. That spreadsheet is the whole system.

Step 2. Leave it alone for 30 days. Listings do not perform on day one and then stop. Some sites have a new arrivals feed that sends a small burst and then goes quiet, others send a trickle from category pages for months. A week is not long enough to tell those apart.

Step 3. Read three numbers, not one. After 30 days, open your analytics traffic acquisition report, filter to utm_medium = directory, and for each source write down: sessions, the share of those sessions that did the thing you care about, and the number of signups or installs attributed to it. If you have no signup event configured, use whatever the closest real action is, such as reaching the docs or starting the free tier. Referral traffic that bounces immediately is not traffic, it is a bot or a bored click.

Step 4. Apply the rule. Compare against the hour you spent, not against zero.

Which listings should you drop after a month?

Use a rule you decided in advance, because after the fact everyone rationalises.

• Zero sessions in 30 days. Drop it. Do not resubmit, do not upgrade, do not chase the moderator. The listing is not broken, the directory just has no readers.
• Sessions but no engaged sessions. Drop it, and check the source before you do. A wave of visits with no time on page is usually crawler and scraper traffic bouncing around a link farm, which is exactly the kind of site Google's spam policies describe.
• A handful of sessions and at least one real action. Keep it. A directory that sent three people who signed up is doing better than one that sent three hundred who left, and that is a small experiment worth repeating on similar sites.
• Steady sessions, no conversions, but a followed link on a page that ranks. Keep it and leave it alone. Costs nothing to maintain.
• Anything you paid for that produced nothing. Do not renew. A paid slot buys position and a badge. It never buys an audience, and no honest directory will tell you it does.

Dropping a listing usually just means never touching it again. If a directory is genuinely low quality and you are worried about the association, note that Search Console's own disavow documentation says Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance in most cases, and that most sites will not need the disavow tool at all. The sensible order is to stop creating the pattern rather than to panic about links already out there.

What should you do instead of mass submission?

The alternative to submitting to 200 directories is not submitting to zero. It is submitting to the ten that have people on them, doing it properly, and spending the reclaimed time on distribution that compounds.

Pick your list from places with visible activity and a review step, which is the filter we used when we wrote where to submit your app for free and the broader guide to where to post your app. Prepare one asset pack so the tenth submission takes five minutes instead of forty. Tag every URL. Then stop, and go do the uncomfortable version of marketing: message the people who have the problem your app solves, post where they already are, and answer questions in public with your name on them.

Skip the bulk auto-submission services entirely. What they sell is a burst of listings on sites with no readers, created in a pattern that looks exactly like the thing Google's link spam policies describe. The best case is that you paid for nothing. Nothing in the good case makes it worth the bad one.

Frequently asked questions

Are nofollow links useless?

No, they are just useless for the one thing people buy them for. A nofollowed link still sends clicks, still puts your name on a page, and still gets read by humans, and Google treats the attribute as a hint rather than an absolute rule about what it will crawl. Judge the link by whether people use it. A nofollowed link from a page with an audience beats a followed link from a page nobody visits, every time.

Will submitting to 100 directories hurt my site?

Careful submissions to real directories will not, and Google's disavow documentation is explicit that in most cases it can assess which links to trust without help from you. The risk is not the count, it is the pattern. Paying a service to blast identical listings across hundreds of empty sites creates exactly the footprint described in the link spam policies, and it does that while producing no traffic. The reason not to do it is that it wastes your money before it ever gets to the question of harm.

How long before a directory listing shows any effect?

Give it 30 days before you judge it, and expect any traffic effect to show up in the first week or two if it is going to show up at all. Search coverage of the listing page itself takes longer, since Google has to crawl and index it first, and there is no schedule for that. Anyone quoting you a precise timeline for a site they do not run is guessing.

Should I pay for a submission service to build links?

For links, no. You would be paying for placements that are mostly nofollowed, on sites with no readers, in a pattern search engines are explicitly looking for. If your reason is time rather than links, that is a fairer argument, but do the maths first: an asset pack plus a tagged URL makes each manual submission take a few minutes, and you get to choose the destinations and measure them one by one. A paid featured slot on a directory you have already measured is a different decision entirely, and a defensible one, as long as you know you are buying position and not an audience.

One listing you can measure beats fifty you can't

If your app is free, free-trial or freemium and has a working URL, submit it to the showcase. It costs nothing, a human reads every submission, and the outbound link on your listing is a followed one, which you can verify in ten seconds using the inspect step above. Tag the URL before you paste it in, check back in 30 days, and let the number decide. While you are here, browse what is already listed and try one, because that is the half of a showcase most makers skip.