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- Hacker News
- Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but backlinks has never been less important for SEO than they are right now.
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.
by pembrook - That will soon make these sorts of lists more useful, as their usefulness to spammers/seo optimizers diminishes.by kbelder
- I have a new startup, it's been going pretty poorly. I think it serves a great market and could be useful if it could get in front of the right people. The problem with a lot of these sites is they won't allow you to shill and the ones that do require lengthy sign up processes or money. I tried to post to alternativeto but I had to wait 7 days! Because my account was too new. I considered AdWords but again I'd be paying hundreds or even thousands per month and I have no customers so it doesn't make sense to do that and idk if it would even result in any sign ups.by Lord_Zero
- Who are the right people?by inigyou
- Having Medium on top is a weird choice in 2026, I find. It's been years since Medium was anything but a spam platform, and with the age of LLM-generated writing the whole thing can be written off. I don't even click on any Medium links anymore, it's so rarely worth it.by vortegne
- Here's a much larger list (1,057 sites): https://pastes.io/rcPg2RLCby pwython
- > earn quality backlinks
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.
by Retr0id - The directories have to assume everyone is doing it for personal benefit. That's one of their main hooks to gather submissions, and they have to deal with the spam of bad actors.
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.
by hombre_fatal - by dvh
- ...recursion?!by xiaoyu2006
- I'd really like a website that submits your website to websites that lists websites that lists websites to submit your website to.by andrelaszlo
- Post another to HN, and it’s a good start…by paulddraper
- Sounds more fun than a recipe site.
- It could be a cousin to Wikipedia's List of Lists of Lists:
- While i appreciate that there are websites where you can list your website, compiling them in a publicly available list is a recipe for spam.
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.
by firefoxd - why would I get banned for showing my stuff?by faeyanpiraat
- How long does someone need to join the community before it's not a drive by? 3 hours? 3 days? 3 weeks? 3 months? 3 years?by fragmede
- Website catalogues exist for more than a decade. They were one of the first attempts at gaming SEO.by atraac
- > Imagine never using HN and then posting a show HN.
There's three green accounts on the front page of /show right now
by kube-system - At listennotes.com , we have to delete tons of fake podcasts submitted to our site [1]
why do people create fake podcasts? they want to get backlinks from all podcast directories
podcasts are distributed via rss feed. and spammers/"growth hackers" put tons of links in the rss feed.
and podcast hosting services (especially those allow free trials, e.g., rss.com, ) could help them one-click to distribute to a bunch of podcast apps / websites. this is like one-click large scale spamming automation
any examples? here you go -
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=UU88%20
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=%E6%B6%A8%E7%B2%89
* https://open.spotify.com/search/%E6%B6%A8%E7%B2%89/podcasts
most podcast websites / apps don't delete fake podcasts like we do at listennotes.com . so i guess the backlink hack w/ fake podcasts works. real human podcast listeners might suffer with spammy fake shows even on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
by wenbin - ... in general directory sites died because they got taken over by spam.by PaulHoule
- > Please Log In to see this info. It is to prevent malicious computer programs from scraping this website.
It looks like you require an email address just to provide a link to the podcast you listed. I don't buy that it is necessary to prevent scrapers.
by doginasuit - What’s old is new again. In the 90s we used services like Submit It to get an URL into all the crawlers and indices. Now the search engines aren’t the challenge, it’s the sites targeting specific audiences.
- ya i cant believe im seeing this againby htx80nerd
- > Now the search engines aren’t the challenge
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…
by Barbing - Kinda reminds me of DMoz.by moebrowne
- Ha, a new/old webring. If you are reading this and know what that is, it's time for your prostate/mammogram check-up.by hexajon
- And don't forget StumbleUpon...by rognjen
- Was that creaking sound your knee or mine?by dofm
- I have been maintaining my own metalist of directories where one can submit their indie/personal websites to. In alphabetical order, here is what it looks like right now:
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 a decentralised network of personal websites (much like in a webring, except that the network is shaped like a graph rather than a ring): https://susam.codeberg.page/wcn/. More details here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander
by susam