I submitted my product to a lot of directories over the past few weeks. Then I measured what those listings actually gave me, and the answer was worse than the page count suggested: twenty four listings across twenty one domains, and five links a search engine would follow.
I assumed the other sixteen were nofollow out of habit, or caution, or because that is what platforms do now. Then one of them sent me an email that explained the whole thing in one sentence, and I realised I had the causality backwards.
I have a launch scheduled on a directory next week. Their reminder email included this:
Free launches that finish below 10 go back to the waiting line and their backlink becomes nofollow.
Read that again as a statement about pricing rather than about spam. The link is not nofollow because they distrust me. It is nofollow because I have not earned it yet, and there is a published threshold at which it converts. Ten upvotes.
That is not a policy about link quality. It is a product with a price, and the price happens to be denominated in attention rather than money.
A second directory emailed me a few days earlier offering their badge for my site. The pitch listed three benefits, and the third was the real one:
After 50 external badge views, a dofollow link from your [...] listing back to your site.
I measured my listing on that site the same hour. The outbound link to me carries rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow". So they are not offering a bonus. They are holding something back and naming its price: fifty views of their badge, placed on my own site.
A third directory offers two ways to launch: free with a verified badge on your site, or a two-figure fee to skip the queue and pick your own date. Same structure, two currencies.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this as an accusation and it is not one. All three of those offers are stated openly, on their own pages, in their own emails. Nobody is hiding anything. They are businesses, the traffic they send is real, and the editorial work of running a directory is not free. This is just what the product is.
My original question was why sixteen of my twenty one domains give nothing. I had been treating it as a quality signal, as though those sites had looked at my product and decided it did not merit a followed link.
The likelier explanation is duller and more useful: the followed link is the thing they sell. A free listing gets you a page. The page is real, it is indexable, it will rank for your product name. What it will not do is pass anything, because passing something is the paid tier.
I checked this against the five that do give me a followed link, expecting to find that none of them sell anything. Four of them have never sent me a commercial email of any kind. The fifth sells advertising and a directory-submission service aggressively, and gives me a followed link anyway.
So the rule is not universal, and I am not going to pretend it is. One clean counterexample out of five is enough to say: this explains a lot of cases, not all of them.
A followed link obtained by placing that site's badge on mine is a reciprocal arrangement. That is the textbook definition of a link scheme, and it is the specific thing search engines discount when they find it. Paying for it with a badge does not make it a different thing than paying for it with money; it just moves the payment to a place where it is visible to everyone including the search engine.
The upvote threshold is different and I think it is fine. Ten people choosing your product on launch day is not a purchase, it is a signal, and a directory using it to decide who gets a followed link is doing something defensible. I will probably not reach ten, because reaching it means asking people to go and click, and I do not have a list of people to ask. That is a real consequence of having no audience yet, and it is not something a rule change on their side would fix.
Count links, not listings. Twenty four pages sounded like progress until I ran the check. Five followed links is the honest number, and it took one script and an afternoon.