If you have ever tried to build backlinks for a new site, you have met The List. Someone shares a spreadsheet of “100+ high-DA directories,” you spend a weekend submitting to all of them, and most of the links never land, never count, or never existed.
The lists get copied from each other, the numbers never get checked, and the dead entries never get removed. So we checked them. We crawled roughly 900 submission directories from the lists that circulate in founder communities, and independently graded 863 of them on the four things that decide whether a backlink is worth getting.
You can browse and filter the full graded list here. Here is what the data shows.
The Domain Rating numbers are inflated
The single most repeated figure on these lists is Domain Rating, and it is often wrong. We re-checked every site’s DR against Ahrefs’ public data. Plenty of directories circulated as “DR 90+” came back in the single digits. One listed at DR 92 measured 13. Another at DR 90 measured 12.
That matters because DR is the number people use to decide where to spend their time. If a list inflates it, you are prioritising the wrong sites. We only credit a Domain Rating we measured ourselves, on a domain we are sure we identified.
”Free” is not always free
A large share of directories are technically free to list on. But some of them require you to put their badge, or a link back to them, on your own site first. That is not free. You are paying in links instead of dollars, and a chain of sites that all do this to each other is a link ring that passes very little real authority.
We scanned each directory’s submission pages for that requirement and flag it as free, link required. We also mapped which directories link to each other, and found clusters trading links in tight reciprocal rings. A backlink from a site that exists to trade links is worth almost nothing, and association with one is a risk, not a win.
Half the links do not pass authority
When you submit to a directory, the listing’s link is often no-follow, which tells search engines not to pass any ranking signal. That can still be fine for visibility and referral traffic, but it is not the SEO backlink most people think they are getting. We read the actual link markup on each site so you can tell the difference before you spend an hour on a submission.
How to use this
The graded list lets you filter to what you actually want: free directories with real authority that give a do-follow link, in your industry, that are not part of a link ring. Of the 863 we graded, fewer than a third cleared that bar. Those are the ones worth your weekend. The rest you can skip with a clear conscience.
This is patterns in public data, not an accusation about any person or company, and we do not name operators. Domain Rating is an estimate and shifts over time, so confirm any single site before you act. We refresh the grades regularly.
Submitting to the good ones by hand still takes weeks. If you would rather have the SEO work done for you, Fokal handles content, schema, and editorial backlinks from real, independent sites, for a flat $99 a month.