Only 4 of 58 Directory Listings Delivered Indexable Followed Backlinks

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A developer spent twelve days submitting a Chrome extension to software directories, accumulating 58 live listing pages across 21 domains. After writing a script to audit every outbound link's rel attribute, only 24 pages contained any link at all, and just five of those carried a followed link. A further check of robots meta tags revealed one of those five followed links sat on a noindex page, making it effectively worthless for SEO over time. The five domains providing followed links were make.rs, peerpush.net, startupranking.com, superlaunchlist.com, and webstoreextensions.com. The exercise highlighted that counting live listings is the wrong metric — the rel attribute and indexability status together determine whether a directory submission delivers any real search authority.

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