Four directory submissions, one followed link: what two weeks of listing actually returned

Across four directory submissions to five prepared channels, exactly one produced a followed link back to trustgrowth.ai. That is the finding. Everything else here is the evidence behind it, and what it cost.

What we found

• One followed outbound link across the cohort, from SaaSHub.
• Four of five prepared channels submitted; Fazier was prepared and never sent.
• $36.89 total cash, all of it on Uneed.
• One channel, StartupBase, had still not published at 14 days.
• No referral or traffic numbers: our per-source attribution is not wired up, and we do not publish what we cannot verify.

The advice, and what it leaves out

Every startup-growth checklist says to submit your product to directories for backlinks. None of them says what a submission actually returns: how long publication takes, whether the outbound link is followed, whether the platform keeps your tracking parameters, or what the listing costs in cash and operator time. We ran it on ourselves with a dated log, and we're publishing the link layer here because the link layer is the part we can verify.

What we did

We submitted trustgrowth.ai to four of five prepared directory channels (SaaSHub on 2026-08-06, Uneed on 2026-08-08, then AlternativeTo and StartupBase on 2026-08-09) and left Fazier prepared but unsubmitted. Each submission has a dated record of what was sent and what came back.

What came back

Here is the full state of all five channels. Every row was read directly from the listing page linked in its first column on 2026-08-23, and the SaaSHub row is the only one carrying a followed outbound link.

Channel Submitted State Outbound link Cash (USD) SaaSHub 2026-08-06 live since 2026-08-09, persistent primary "Visit website" renders rel="" — followed $0 AlternativeTo 2026-08-09 approved 2026-08-10, live, persistent rel="nofollow noopener"; the form rejects UTM parameters $0 recorded Uneed 2026-08-08 live since 2026-08-18 rel="noopener", tracked URL preserved on the CTA $36.89 (paid skip-the-line) StartupBase 2026-08-09 still unpublished at 14 days; page reads "Launch is being published" none $0 Fazier never submitted prepared only — $0

Total cash across the five channels: $36.89, all of it spent on Uneed.

Method: how we read this

Five channels were prepared for this wave and four were submitted, between 2026-08-06 and 2026-08-09. The table covers all five, including the one we prepared and never sent.

For each channel we recorded the submission date, then read the live listing page on 2026-08-23 and inspected the rendered outbound link to trustgrowth.ai: its rel attribute, and whether the tracking parameters we submitted survived onto the href. That reading is taken from the page itself, not from a backlink tool.

"Followed" means an outbound link whose rel does not carry nofollow. Cash is direct spend recorded against the channel. Operator time is wall-clock minutes spent preparing and submitting.

Every state in the table is one date's reading, and the SaaSHub listing, like every other page in the table, can change after it.

Finding one: most directory links are nofollow

One followed link came out of the whole cohort. SaaSHub's primary "Visit website" button, as observed on 2026-08-23, renders with an empty rel attribute, while the secondary links on the same page carry rel="nofollow". That listing cost 61 minutes of operator time and no cash, which makes it both the cheapest line in the table and the only one that produced a followed link.

If backlinks are the reason you're submitting to a directory, that is the yield to budget against.

Is a nofollow directory listing worthless?

No. It does not make the other listings worthless. A nofollow listing is still a page a human can find you on, and still a referrer. But it does mean the link-equity case for directory submission is thinner than the checklists imply, and if domain authority is what you are chasing, four submissions is a smaller lever than the advice suggests. Decide which of the two things you are actually buying before you spend the time.

Finding two: some platforms strip your tracking parameters

AlternativeTo, as observed on 2026-08-23, rejects UTM parameters at submission time, so anyone building attribution reporting on UTM-tagged directory URLs will get nothing back from that channel. Referrer domain is the only signal left. Uneed, by contrast, preserved our tracked URL on its call-to-action link as observed on the same date; we're not printing that URL here because it carries a tracking key, but the parameters survived. Check parameter handling per channel before you build any reporting on top of it, because you cannot retrofit a parameter onto a listing that already rejected it.

Finding three: "submitted" is not "listed"

Two weeks after submission, StartupBase had not published our listing at all. The page read "Launch is being published" as observed on 2026-08-23. That's a state, not a verdict. A platform that's slow today may publish tomorrow, and we're not treating 14 days of silence as a statement about the channel's reliability generally. The practical point is narrower: if your plan counts a submission as a placement, your plan is counting something that has not happened yet.

What a reciprocal-badge listing really costs

Fazier's free tier, as observed on 2026-08-23, states "A backlink to our site is required (on your homepage or footer)" and "Free with embed badge," while its paid tier sells "No backlink required" as a perk. A permanent change to your own site is a price, not a formality. The listing stays only as long as the badge does. We haven't shipped Fazier's badge, so we haven't submitted there.

We are not observing this practice from the outside. A "Launched on StartupBase" badge sits in the footer of this site as we publish this — the platform's own badge asset, put up when we submitted. It links to the StartupBase listing in the table above: the one that, as observed on 2026-08-23, still reads "Launch is being published."

We are leaving it up and telling you what it means instead. It means we submitted. It does not mean we are listed. Finding three is running live in our own footer, and a reader who clicks that badge lands on the evidence for it.

The paid placement, and the call we haven't made

Uneed's free queue was scheduled into 2027, so we paid $36.89 to skip it, and the listing went live on the booked date. The vendor delivered exactly what it sold. Whether a rel="noopener" link with preserved tracking was worth that is not a call we're making in this post — that value call is still open, and we would rather leave it open than settle it on a window this short.

What we are not reporting

We are not reporting referral numbers here. Our per-source attribution for these links is not wired up yet, and we would rather publish nothing than a number we cannot stand behind.

Where this could be wrong

Two objections worth naming against our own analysis. First, a sample this small does not generalize to directories as a category; the ratio we observed is a fact about these listings on this date, not a rate you should plan against. Second, StartupBase's non-publication at 14 days is a snapshot, not a trend. If it publishes next week, the finding in this post about that channel is stale by the time you read it, and we would rather say that here than have you discover it yourself.

What we do next

We'll check back on 2026-09-08, thirty days out, to see whether StartupBase has published and to make the Uneed value call with a longer observation window behind it. Until then, this post stands as the current-state record, not a forecast.

Check the outbound links on your own directory listings, whether each one is followed and whether it kept your tracking parameters, and run a free TrustGrowth scan at https://trustgrowth.ai/ .