You launched something, and the advice arrives fast: get on Product Hunt, submit to every startup directory, list your business everywhere you can. It feels like real SEO progress. Some of it is worth doing, but most of those links do far less for your search rankings than the effort suggests. Here is the honest breakdown of what helps, what does not, and why.
Full disclosure: we build a website audit, and we ran our own directory experiment on Stackra, so weigh the closing suggestion with that in mind. The distinction in this guide, followed links versus nofollow links, is standard SEO, not our opinion.
What a backlink actually does for SEO
When another website links to yours, that link can pass a ranking signal, a vote of confidence that helps your search visibility. But only if it is a followed link. A site can tag its outbound links with a small piece of code, rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc" (user-generated content), that tells Google not to pass that signal. The link still works for people clicking it. It just does not carry SEO weight.
Why most directory and launch links do little for rankings
Large user-submission platforms and directories mark their outbound links nofollow or user-generated by default. They do this to discourage spam, since anyone can submit a link. So the link exists, visitors can click it, but it passes little to no ranking authority. Some launch platforms also render their links with JavaScript or place them behind interstitial pages, which limits how search engines crawl them further.
Product Hunt, most free startup directories, and social profiles overwhelmingly use nofollow or user-generated link tags. Treat them as traffic and awareness channels, not SEO link building.
What these listings do help with
This is not a reason to skip them. They just help with different things than rankings:
- •Real referral traffic and your first users, especially on launch day.
- •Brand awareness, which shows up later as people searching for you by name.
- •The occasional genuine editorial writeup or roundup that does use a followed link, which is a real SEO win when it happens.
The 20-second check: is a link followed?
You can check any link pointing to you. Open the page that links to your site, right-click the link, and choose Inspect. Look at the anchor tag. If you see rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc", the link is not passing ranking authority. If there is no rel tag, or it says rel="dofollow", it counts. Google Search Console also lists the sites linking to you, so you can see what has actually been found.
What to chase instead for real authority
The links that move rankings are the ones that are relevant and followed. They take more effort, but they compound:
- •Genuine mentions from sites in your world: a supplier, a partner, a local newspaper, an industry blog, a customer who writes about you.
- •A few high-quality niche directories that are actually relevant to your business and use followed links, rather than every general directory you can find.
- •Content on your own site worth linking to, which is what earns the editorial links that count.
The bottom line
Do Product Hunt and the directories for the launch traffic and the first users, because those are real. Just do not count them as SEO. Set the expectation correctly and spend your link-building effort where it compounds: relevant, followed links from sites that matter in your industry.