Are Directory Backlinks Still Worth It in 2026?
Most directories send almost no traffic, so are directory backlinks still worth it? Yes, but only for the link. Here's the data, and when to skip one.
The short answer is yes, directories are still worth it, even when they send you no traffic. Most of the value sits in the backlink, a dofollow link from a domain Google already trusts, which tells Google your site is credible too.
What the "directories are dead" crowd gets right
Most startup directories are close to dead traffic wise. I dug into this in a blog, where I went through every directory we launched on. Just 4% of our signups said they found us through a directory. Most came from X or Reddit instead.
So if you submit to 50 directories expecting a wave of signups, you will be disappointed, and you will walk away convinced directories are dead. That is the trap. You measured the wrong thing.
So why are directory backlinks still worth it?
Because the link does the work, and the link does not care whether anyone clicked it.
We submitted LaunchPanda to around 45 directories and went from DR 0 to DR 28 in 30 days. No paid placements, no outreach, no guest posts, just submissions. It has kept climbing since:
That number matters because Domain Rating is a proxy for how much Google trusts your domain, and that trust changes what happens to every page you publish afterwards. Once your DR is high, the content you add after that, blog posts for example, ranks higher than it would have on a weak domain, and that turns into more organic traffic.
When directory backlinks are not worth it
However, not all directories are worth it. Some of them do not give you a dofollow backlink, which means their link does not count as a vote for your credibility, and that vote is the whole reason you are there.
Things to look out for:
- Nofollow-only listings. A nofollow link passes no authority, so it only earns its slot if the directory sends real traffic, and most do not.
- Sites that charge you just to be listed. Paying a low-DR site purely for a link is the exact pattern Google's policy describes. Paying for a featured slot on a directory that would list you free anyway is a traffic decision, not an SEO one.
- No review process. If everything submitted goes live instantly with no human check, the domain fills up with junk and loses whatever authority it had.
- DR under 10 with no audience. The link is worth close to nothing today, and the site may not exist in a year.
How do you tell if a directory is worth submitting to?
Four checks, in order. It takes about a minute per site.
- Confirm the link is dofollow. Open an existing listing on that directory, view the page source, and look for rel="nofollow" on the outbound link. Once your own listing is live, our free backlink checker does it for you and tells you whether the link is still there at all.
- Check the DR. Higher is better, but anything above 20 is worth the five minutes the form takes.
- Check their listings are indexed. Search site:thedirectory.com in Google. If their listing pages are not in Google's index, your link sits on a page Google never sees.
- Check it is still alive. A directory with no new listings in six months is abandoned, and abandoned domains bleed authority.
The verdict
Directory backlinks are worth it if you are under roughly DR 30 and you judge them by referring domains instead of clicks. Per hour spent, nothing else returns as much for a new domain, and the return compounds.
They stop being worth it when you are paying for low-quality links, or when your DR is already high enough that one more listing does nothing.
If you want to start, the 10 free dofollow backlink directories list is the fastest way in. All free, all dofollow, all doable in an afternoon. Here are a few of them:
And if filling in 40 forms sounds like a bad use of your week, Auto Launch submits your product for you and tracks which listings actually went live.
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