Track your Domain Rating free, then submit and track backlinks on maker-proven startup directories. Every listing verified: live, dofollow, indexed, still there. $10 once per website, no subscription.
Hey Product Hunt,
I make Hobbit, a football predictions app. Getting it in front of anyone meant
submitting to directories, so I did what everyone does: opened a spreadsheet,
worked through a list, ticked the rows off.
Months later I found out one of those links had been gone for eight days.
Nothing told me. I only noticed because I happened to open the page.
That is the half nobody builds for. Submitting is the easy part. What happens
afterwards decides whether the evening was worth anything, and it turns out
"we listed you" and "you got a backlink that counts" are four different
outcomes:
- the link is there and passes credit
- the link is there and passes nothing, because it is nofollow
- the link is dofollow on a page carrying noindex, so Google drops the page and
the link stops counting. This one looks like a win in every tool that only
reads rel
- the listing was never published at all, and nobody tells you that either
ShipDR closes that loop. You record a submission, and it re-reads the listing
every day: is the link live, is it dofollow, is the page indexable, is it even
crawlable. You get told the day something changes, instead of finding out
months later the way I did.
The pool is 456 directories, pruned from a public 582 row dataset and then
audited one at a time. The bar to get in is simple: an indie dev with a brand
new product site has to be able to submit and actually receive a listing link.
No media pitching, no "come back when you have 10k users".
Free plan is DR tracking for unlimited websites. $10 once, per website, unlocks
the tracking engine. Not a subscription. There is also a free Chrome extension
that reads any directory page you open and tells you what that listing really
gave you.
One thing I will not claim: that your DR goes up. DR is Ahrefs' black box and
nobody outside Ahrefs can promise you a number. ShipDR verifies the work and
reports what it observed, which is the only honest thing a tool like this can
do.
I would genuinely like to know: which directory has wasted the most of your
time? That is the kind of thing this is meant to make visible.
Report
Congrats on shipping Wilshere. You asked which directory ate the most time — for me it was the "submit and wait for approval" ones that just never published, no signal at all, you refresh months later like you said. Honestly catching that "never listed" case is as valuable as catching a dead link. Does the Chrome extension flag that live while I'm on the page?
That case is the one the whole thing was built for.
"Submitted, but did it ever go live" is the loop nobody closes, and you are right that it is worth as much as catching a dead link.
The extension does flag it: open the listing URL and it says NO LINK when nothing on that page points at your domain.
Two caveats I would rather state than not. It only knows when you open the page, which is exactly the thing
you stop doing after a month.
And "no link" is an absence, not a verdict: some directories route their outbound click through a counter, which from inside a tab looks identical to never having been listed.
The daily server check follows that hop. The extension cannot.
Where it is still weak: if the directory never gave you a URL at all, you paste the one you expect. Auto discovery for that case is not built yet.
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One thing that would help a lot is letting me see the Domain Rating trend over time as a small chart next to each tracked site. Right now I only get a snapshot number, so it's hard to tell whether a backlink actually moved the needle or if I'm just looking at noise. Even a simple 30 day sparkline would make the tool way more useful for reporting results back to my cofounder.
Hobbit AI
Congrats on shipping Wilshere. You asked which directory ate the most time — for me it was the "submit and wait for approval" ones that just never published, no signal at all, you refresh months later like you said. Honestly catching that "never listed" case is as valuable as catching a dead link. Does the Chrome extension flag that live while I'm on the page?
Hobbit AI
@saied_alimoradi
That case is the one the whole thing was built for.
"Submitted, but did it ever go live" is the loop nobody closes, and you are right that it is worth as much as catching a dead link.
The extension does flag it: open the listing URL and it says NO LINK when nothing on that page points at your domain.
Two caveats I would rather state than not. It only knows when you open the page, which is exactly the thing
you stop doing after a month.
And "no link" is an absence, not a verdict: some directories route their outbound click through a counter, which from inside a tab looks identical to never having been listed.
The daily server check follows that hop. The extension cannot.
Where it is still weak: if the directory never gave you a URL at all, you paste the one you expect. Auto discovery for that case is not built yet.
One thing that would help a lot is letting me see the Domain Rating trend over time as a small chart next to each tracked site. Right now I only get a snapshot number, so it's hard to tell whether a backlink actually moved the needle or if I'm just looking at noise. Even a simple 30 day sparkline would make the tool way more useful for reporting results back to my cofounder.
Hobbit AI
@enterpriseux
Good news: that chart already exists. Every tracked site has its full DR history on the dashboard, one reading a day, with the 30d delta next to it.
Free plan includes it.
If you were in the extension popup, that one is a snapshot on purpose, but you not finding the chart is on me, not you.
A sparkline in the site list is a fair ask and the data is already there.
One honest note on "moved the needle": I do not attribute a DR move to a single link. DR is Ahrefs' black box.
What I do instead is put the activity calendar right under the DR chart, so when the curve steps you can see what
you submitted around that date and judge it yourself.