What eleven directories actually did with my launch

Launching a product is sold as a day. It is not. It is twenty afternoons: a
Show HN, a dozen directories, a newsletter swap, a podcast, spread over weeks,
each one asking for the same paragraph in a slightly different box. Mine came
to eleven directories, and by the end I could not have told you which ones I
had finished.

Then the afternoons stop, and something quieter starts: the listings you made
carry on existing without you. Some send visitors. Some link back to you and
some do not. Some quietly stop existing. Nobody tells you which is which,
because from where you stand every one of them looks the same as the day you
made it.

I checked mine. Here is what I would do differently, and what you can check
yourself in ten minutes without any tools.

Half of my listings were not doing what I assumed

Of the first eight I checked, four link back to my domain with a dofollow
link. The rest either use nofollow or do not link back at all.

That is not a scandal, and it does not make those directories bad. Plenty of
good ones nofollow everything by policy, and say so. The problem is that I did
not know, and I would have told you before checking that all eleven were
"backlinks". If a chunk of why you are submitting is SEO, then which of these
you got is most of the value, and it is the part nobody reports back to you.

You can check this by hand. Open your listing, view source, and search the
page for your domain. If it is not there, the page does not link to you at
all. If it is, look at the rel attribute on that anchor. No nofollow means the
link counts.

Some links are real but invisible

Three of the eighteen directory pages I fetched had no links in them
whatsoever. Not "no link to me": no links at all, on pages that show a full
listing in a browser.

Those sites build their pages with JavaScript, so the HTML that arrives is an
empty shell and the links appear only once the browser runs the code. My own
listing on BuildHop is one of these. Their founder told me they give two
dofollow links, my check said none, and when I rendered the page properly the
links were right there with no nofollow on them. He was right, I was wrong,
and I have fixed my end.

Worth knowing when you pick where to launch: Google renders JavaScript and
will usually see those links, but many other crawlers do not, and neither do
several of the backlink tools founders use to check their own work. A link
that only exists after JavaScript is a real link that is harder for the rest
of the internet to see.

A listing in review is not a listing

One directory came back showing no link to me at all. Before I said anything
about it I checked their other listings, and every live one had a dofollow
link. Mine did not, because mine was still waiting for approval.

Obvious in hindsight, easy to get wrong: an unapproved listing and an
ungenerous directory look identical from outside. If you are keeping score of
your launch, do not count a placement until it is live, and if a directory
looks like it is stiffing you, check somebody else's listing there before you
conclude anything.

Post the link you can measure

The thing I would most want to go back and change is small. When you submit,
most forms ask for your product URL, and almost everyone pastes the plain one.
Post a tagged URL instead, so when someone arrives and signs up, you can tell
which of the eleven sent them.

You cannot add this afterwards. A plain URL posted today cannot be attributed
tomorrow unless the directory lets you edit the listing, and many do not. It
costs nothing at submission time and it is the difference between knowing your
launch worked and believing it did.

What I cannot tell you yet

How many launch listings quietly die, and how fast. I have been watching since
August, which is not long enough to say anything honest about decay. Ask me in
three months and I will publish the number, whatever it is.

If you want the same check on your own launches without doing it by hand,
the free scan reads your site for the directory badges you have
collected, follows them, and tells you which listings are still standing and
what each one does with your link. No account, about half a minute, and it
says plainly where it cannot tell.