I built BetaList 16 years ago which was one of the first "product discovery" platforms. Years before Product Hunt, etc.
I manually reviewed every submission and unfortunately often I had to tell founders that their startup didn't qualify to be included. Almost everyone would (understandably!) argue their case, but as volume increased I couldn't afford to go into a deep argument with every single founder.
That's when I made https://submit.co a site similar to OP's. The idea being that instead of say "No, we will not feature your startup" I now gave them an alternative place to put their energy.
Initially it was mostly a list of tech blogs, but as more product discovery platforms popped up, I started adding them too. In a sense, I was promoting my competition but it was exactly the startups we couldn't list any way for one reason or another.
Eventually that list of "places to submit your startup" got so popular (and copied everywhere ) that it started driving traffic back to BetaList. (I included it at the very top of the list).
I remember some bloggers at the time describing the same thing [1].
I'd be curious if anyone knows more details.
But Curlie doesn't appear in the website linked in the parent post.
Dmoz! Those were the good days. :-)
Although it can still be a gamble whether a small site made it to DuckDuckGo (Bing’s crawler)
But that only affects about seven of us anyway so your point stands
> Submit It
Trying to remember a different one…
Rather than post links to your websites on these websites, you need to share your website with your community. Imagine never using HN and then posting a show HN. You'll probably quickly get your domain banned.
When you are part of a website community, it's much easier to understand what kind of things you should post, as opposed to just drive-by posting everywhere.
The audience for these listings are people trying to take shortcuts.
I worked in SEO from 2008 until 2015, and developed a lot of tools for increasing your PR from backlink indexing, to running a 15k domain blog network designed to build links to links to links to you, and my favorite: Click Faker - if you were ranked on Google already, on Page one or 2, it would search google find your site, click into it, navigate around, sit on some pages for a while before clicking an exit link or closing the browser - it was very powerful, but nearly impossible to scale, since it needed local residential IPs and I'm against botnets.
1. The circles actually couldn't close if you were looking for the ultimate page rank passthrough, they were actually a line, but still called circles.
https://blogs.hn/ (by @surprisetalk)
https://hnpwd.github.io/ (I am one of the maintainers)
https://iii.social/ (by @freshman_dev)
https://indieblog.page/ (by @splitbrain)
https://kagi.com/smallweb/ (by @freediver)
https://marginalia-search.com/ (by @marginalia_nu)
https://minifeed.net/ (by @freetonik)
https://susam.net/wander/ (I developed this)
https://text.blogosphere.app/ (by @ramkarthikk)
A clarification: The Wander link above (which I developed) is not something where you list your website. It is a tool you host on your website to become part of the Wander Console network: https://susam.codeberg.page/wcn/. More details here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander
Well, at least its honest. For many (most?) of the listed sites, drive-by submitting a link just for the SEO juice would be considered rude.
If your website is a good quality addition to the lists, just submit it. Your exact motivation isn't really relevant if the qualifier holds.
Google has slowly de-prioritized them as a ranking signal over time due to the constant abuse, the death of the blogosphere (the vast majority of websites are now corporate blogspam with few legitimate organic links), and the fact that every major social platform now de-ranks posts with external links in them (to keep people on-site).
And as far as I know the crawlers in LLMs don't use backlinks as a signal at all.
opensource.builders
I remember sitting there submitting my geocities website to every search engine and website that would accept it under the sun
good times
Lists of websites hand curated by categories and topics, and even certified to have AI free content, could be cool.
That is... not the popular assessment of Medium these days. At one point, Medium and the other minimalist one whose name I can't remember (edit: it was Svbtle) were seen as high-prestige and high-signal platforms.
Nowadays Medium is just AI slop and low-effort surface-level takes from people trying to build a personal brand.
What do you think could have prevented its downfall?
Thus, the reading experience was fantastic.
As soon as they opened up to everyone, almost right away the quality dropped. All of a sudden Medium in particular was chock full of shallow "man page disguised as a blog post" posts and "tutorials" from people trying to build their own personal brands. It became a firehose of mediocrity.
Substack is currently experiencing the same cycle.
Ultimately I think, if you want to preserve the elite/luxury/exclusivity reputation, you need to impose artificial scarcity and resist the urge to "hyperscale" or whatever.
1. Medium : https://medium.com
2. Crunchbase : https://crunchbase.com
3. Hacker News : https://news.ycombinator.com
4. Product Hunt : https://producthunt.com
5. Reddit r/SideProject : https://reddit.com
6. Slashdot : https://slashdot.org
7. G2 : https://g2.com
8. Awwwards : https://awwwards.com
9. Capterra : https://capterra.com
10. Dev.to : https://dev.to
11. AlternativeTo : https://alternativeto.net
12. HackerNoon : https://hackernoon.com
13. GetApp : https://getapp.com
14. Software Advice : https://softwareadvice.com
15. Designer News : https://designernews.co
16. F6S : https://f6s.com
17. Indie Hackers : https://indiehackers.com
18. One Page Love : https://onepagelove.com
19. StackShare : https://stackshare.io
20. Hashnode : https://hashnode.com
21. There's An AI For That : https://theresanaiforthat.com
22. Land-book : https://land-book.com
23. BetaList : https://betalist.com
24. Futurepedia : https://futurepedia.io
25. Lobsters : https://lobste.rs
26. Peerlist : https://peerlist.io
27. Futuretools : https://futuretools.io
28. Startup Stash : https://startupstash.com
29. Toolify : https://toolify.ai
30. Httpster : https://httpster.net
31. SaaSHub : https://saashub.com
32. Sidebar : https://sidebar.io
33. Tekpon : https://tekpon.com
34. AllTopStartups : https://alltopstartups.com
35. SaaSworthy : https://saasworthy.com
36. SaaS Landing Page : https://saaslandingpage.com
37. Betapage : https://betapage.co
38. Launching Next : https://launchingnext.com
39. DevHunt : https://devhunt.org
40. Insidr AI : https://insidr.ai
41. SideProjectors : https://sideprojectors.com
42. Startup Fame : https://startupfa.me
43. StartupBase : https://startupbase.io
44. Uneed : https://uneed.best
45. SaaS AI Tools : https://saasaitools.com
46. AngelList : https://angel.co
47. GitHub Trending : https://github.com/trending
48. Dribbble : https://dribbble.com
49. Behance : https://behance.net
50. TechCrunch : https://techcrunch.com
My naive interpretation would be to build tools which other companies want to use but its a bit of chicken and egg problem and maybe these directories help in fixing the issue in the first place of this problem.
Also, with LLM's, I imagine that there are some websites which use AI for writing texts but the thing is that I'd much prefer my things to not be mentioned by them even if it increases the SEO because I'd prefer not my product if I build one when searched to be filled with slop results, and also, everyone is within the rush for gold mines and so we are forgetting writing for the sake of it but there are few people who write blogs for the sake of writing.
Perhaps I recommend looking at some blogging websites and asking them to test your website but this isn't company blog. I think that is a high bar to achieve but I wish you look in doing so and hope someone who's more experienced in SEO can answer it for ya.