How I grew DR faster with directory submissions

Short answer: submitting to directories does raise Domain Rating, but only while the links survive. Verified Tools re-checked the 15 directory badges it was displaying on 2026-08-28: 8 still returned a visible dofollow link, 2 had switched to rel="nofollow", and 1 listing was gone. Three of the fifteen had quietly stopped counting, and none of them said so.

Before I start, a quick clarification for people who are new to SEO.

DR (Domain Rating) is a metric created by tools like Ahrefs. It estimates how strong and trustworthy a website looks based on backlinks from other sites.

It is not a Google ranking factor by itself. But in practice, sites with higher DR usually get indexed faster, rank more easily, and are taken more seriously by both search engines and AI systems.

You can check your website DR using the free Ahrefs Website Authority Checker.

People always ask me how I grew my website DR so quickly. FYI, my Verified Tools (AI & SaaS directory) is currently DR 35, and it’s been about three months since I started focusing on DR.

A lot of people assume DR growth has to be complicated: tons of guest posts, long-term PR, or “one perfect link” from a huge publication. Those things can work, but they can also take a long time.

What worked for me was much simpler, and honestly a bit boring.

What worked for me

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying this just because I run a directory, but my strategy was simple: submit to as many directories as possible.

Not “any directory.” Not random lists. Not cheap bulk gig submissions.

Because I’ve been all-in on growing my website for months, I spent days and nights doing the boring part:

• finding directories
• checking spam score, traffic, and DR
• checking how many outbound links they give
• manually submitting my product info to every directory

Even finding the right directories was harder than it sounds.

Listing your product in irrelevant categories can do more harm than good, and some directories won’t even accept submissions if your DR is below a certain threshold. Others let you fill out the entire submission form, only to ask for payment at the very last step.

You can do what I did, but if you’re the type who ships fast and validates fast, then even if you build quickly, it can still take three months (or longer) to see DR and SEO move.

That’s the real pain point: it’s repetitive and takes long. And if you do it randomly, you can see your website DR stand still or even worse hurt your site’s credibility.

Why “DR 0 is fine” is not fine (in my opinion)

After reading this, you might still think “I’ll just stay at DR 0 for now.” and I don’t think that’s a good idea.

When your domain is brand new, you can build a great landing page and ship fast, but Google still has no reason to trust you. And now it’s not just Google.

People increasingly ask LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI summaries) questions like “best tools for X” or “alternatives to Y.” If your DR is low and your brand barely exists across the web, there’s simply a lower chance that AI models mention your site.

So for me, DR wasn’t about vanity. It was about building baseline credibility fast enough that:

• Google indexes and ranks me sooner
• people can discover me through third-party sites
• AI systems can find consistent signals that my product exists and is trustworthy

Are directory submissions still effective in 2026?

I’ve been growing my website credibility this way, so my answer is “Yes”.

The “directories are spam” advice came from a real place. People used to blast sites into low-quality, auto-approve directories that existed purely to sell links. That created a pattern Google learned to distrust.

But today, directory submissions still help when the directory is:

• niche-relevant (audience matches your product)
• has real traffic (not just empty SEO pages)
• has editorial standards (reviewed, curated, not auto-approve)

In those cases, directories create value in three ways:

1. Links (sometimes dofollow, sometimes not)

2. Mentions and citations (consistent “entity” references across the web)

3. Referral traffic (even small traffic can validate positioning and lead to secondary mentions)

For early-stage sites, this acts as a foundation. It does not replace content or outreach, but it gives your site enough baseline authority so that content ranks faster and outreach works better.

What I would do to grow faster

Submitting to directories does not automatically mean you get backlinks or traffic.

Some directories still exist online but are effectively inactive. They have no real users and send little to no traffic. So a submission alone doesn’t always translate into visible SEO or traffic impact.

That’s why submitting to many directories at once can be useful especially early on. It gives you broader coverage and enough data to understand which directories actually matter.

Using tools like SEO Mode is one practical way to do this at scale. By submitting to many directories at once, you can collect backlinks while also setting up enough coverage to track results and understand which directories actually send users to your site.

Once you have that data, the strategy becomes much clearer. You can focus your time and budget on the directories that consistently drive traffic by improving your listings, testing featured placements, or running targeted marketing on those platforms.

For example, on Verified Tools, featured products tend to receive over 10× higher click-through rates compared to standard listings. This highlights how increased visibility and prominent placement can meaningfully amplify exposure and engagement when users are actively browsing and comparing tools.

One thing to keep in mind about dofollow links

“Free dofollow” isn’t always the best.

If a directory gives free dofollow backlinks to everyone, it’s often sharing its DR across a huge number of outbound links. Each link can be less meaningful.

On the other hand, paid directories sometimes have fewer listings, which can make those links more valuable (depending on the directory). And even when a link is nofollow, the citation and brand context can still matter for discovery and trust, including in AI driven search.

My takeaway

If you’re early-stage and your DR is low, directory submissions are still one of the most reliable tactics to build baseline authority.

If you want speed, consistency, and tracking, a curated service like SEO Mode can be a straightforward way to get the same outcome with far less grind. It helps get your product listed across 100+ relevant directories (including paid ones), making it easier to test directory-driven impact without doing everything by hand.

According to their offering, they also include a DR growth guarantee within a 30-day window which can be useful if your goal is to validate early traction quickly.

If you prefer to do it manually, submit to as many relevant directories as possible, but do it deliberately focusing on relevance, real traffic, and editorial quality.

Update, 2026-08-28: the part nobody tells you about

The strategy above still works. What I underestimated is that the links decay, silently, and your DR is a snapshot of links that may no longer be what they were when you earned them.

I wrote a checker for our own listings — it opens each directory's listing page in a headless browser, finds the link back to us, and reads the rel attribute and whether the link actually renders. A regex on the HTML is not enough: an anchor can keep its href for crawlers while showing nothing to a visitor.

Of the 15 badges Verified Tools was displaying on 2026-08-28:

Not one of those three regressions came with a notice. We were still serving their badge on every page of the site — an outbound link on our side, nothing on theirs. All three came down on 2026-08-28, which is why our footer now shows 12 badges rather than 15.

So the honest version of the advice: submit widely, then re-check quarterly, and drop the badges that stopped paying. The submission is the cheap part. Keeping the links alive is the work, and it is the part that decides whether the DR you built holds.

If you want the shortlist rather than the method, we ranked the best AI tool directories by submission price, link type and queue length.

We later measured what each directory submission actually costs across 31 cited hosts — price floors, lead times and which links were dofollow.