Free nofollow directories, in short
Free almost never means free of conditions. Expect to be asked for a badge in your footer, a link back from your site, or a longer wait than the paying submissions. Read the submission page before you start typing.
Free directory submission sites, defined
A free directory submission site accepts your listing without payment. That is the whole definition, and it hides a lot: free almost always carries a condition. The three most common are a badge or return link on your own site, a review queue that paid submissions skip, and a nofollow link where paying would make it dofollow.
None of those conditions are unreasonable. Directories cost money to run and moderate, and asking for a link back is a fair trade for a page that sends you visitors. The mistake is discovering the condition after you have written the listing rather than before.
By the numbers
These 15 directories have a median rating of DR 62. The strongest is Product Hunt at DR 91, the weakest at DR 10.
That is 4 points above the median for the full list of 175 directories, which sits at DR 58. By band that is 4 rated 80 or above, 4 rated 60 to 79, 2 rated 40 to 59 and 5 rated below 40. 1 of them have no traffic estimate at all, which usually means too little to measure rather than none.
What a listing actually gets you
The case for these is traffic and exposure, not ranking signals. A nofollow link from a site sending real visitors is worth considerably more than a dofollow one from a site sending none, and the biggest launch platforms in existence fall in the first group.
There is a secondary effect that has grown in importance. Nofollow mentions still appear in the link graph, still get crawled, and still form part of the corpus that language models draw on when they answer questions about software. Being absent from those pages is a cost that the attribute does not describe.
Submitting without wasting the evening
Judge these purely on the audience. Sort the table by traffic, ignore the rating column for a moment, and submit to the ones with readers. Write the listing as a piece of marketing rather than a link placement, because the visit is the entire return here and the description is what converts it.
Common mistakes
Agreeing to a badge requirement and then never adding the badge, which gets the listing quietly removed a month later. Submitting to every free directory in one sitting because they are free, which is the exact pattern that makes a link profile look manufactured. And skipping the categories field, which is what decides whether anyone ever sees the entry.
Where to start
By audience size, the biggest here are Product Hunt, AlternativeTo and TrustMRR, led by 4.84M visits a month. 3 approve quickly, Indie Hackers, AlternativeTo and Dodo Payments Index among them.
Questions people ask
How many are there, and what do they cost?
15 directories match on this page. 15 take a submission for nothing, 0 run a free tier with paid upgrades, and 0 charge for every listing.
Which should I submit to first?
By rating, Product Hunt (DR 91), Indie Hackers (DR 81) and AlternativeTo (DR 81). By audience, Product Hunt is the largest at 4.84M visits a month. Relevance beats both: a directory that actually covers what you built will do more than a stronger one that does not.
Where can I submit my website for free?
The table above lists every free option we track, sorted so you can start with the strongest. The free tier on the larger launch platforms is usually worth more than any number of small free-only directories.
Are online directories free?
Many are, and many more run a free tier alongside paid upgrades. What you usually give up on the free path is speed and placement, not the listing itself.
Is a free listing worth less than a paid one?
Not inherently. Several of the highest-rated sites here take free submissions. Paying typically buys position and a faster queue rather than a fundamentally better link.
What does nofollow mean?
It is an attribute on a link telling search engines not to pass ranking signals through it. Introduced to fight comment spam, it is now standard on sites that accept open submissions and cannot vouch for every entry.
Is a nofollow link pointless?
No. It does not pass ranking signals directly, but it still sends visitors, still gets your name in front of people, and still appears in the link graph that other tools and models read. Pointless would be a dofollow link on a page nobody visits.
How do I tell if a link is dofollow or nofollow?
Open the page, view the source, find the link to your site and look for rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". A browser extension will highlight them all at once if you are checking a batch.
Every figure quoted above is read off the table on this page, so it moves as the list does. Domain rating and traffic are third-party estimates captured in September 2026: useful for ordering a shortlist, not precise figures.