A site listing 50 places to submit your site; the SEO trick that died

A 1990s reflex, rebuilt as a single static page

submission.directory does exactly what its title says: it lists places to submit your website. One scrollable page, roughly 50 destinations - Medium, Crunchbase, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit's r/SideProject, Slashdot, G2, Awwwards, Capterra, Dev.to, AlternativeTo, Indie Hackers, Hashnode - each tagged with the pitch to "earn quality backlinks." No login, no algorithm. It hit 410 points fast, and the thread treated it less as a tool than as a time capsule.

The nostalgia was immediate. One reader recalled the exact muscle memory:

"I remember sitting there submitting my geocities website to every search engine and website that would accept it under the sun" — a maker recalling the GeoCities era

Another put the shift precisely: the destinations changed, the move didn't.

"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." — a commenter who used Submit It in the 1990s

The man who ran this exact business, 16 years ago

The sharpest context came from someone who'd built the original version of this idea and watched it mutate.

"I built BetaList 16 years ago… That's when I made https://submit.co a site similar to OP's. The idea being that instead of 'No, we will not feature your startup' I now gave them an alternative place to put their energy." — Marc Köhlbrugge, founder of BetaList and submit.co

He started submit.co as a courtesy for startups he had to reject, seeded it with tech blogs, then added rival discovery platforms as they appeared - effectively promoting his competition because those were the startups he couldn't list himself.

"Backlinks have never been less important"

Then the premise of the whole page got knocked out. The directory sells backlinks; an SEO-watcher argued the currency is nearly worthless now.

"Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but backlinks has never been less important for SEO than they are right now… as far as I know the crawlers in LLMs don't use backlinks as a signal at all." — a commenter tracking Google's ranking-signal changes

A maker who runs his own small sites confirmed it from the other end: chasing the score is theatre.

"boosting DR rating is the biggest psyop of indie hackers: it's temporal and has zero effect on anything. All my websites are 3 to 6 DR points. mdview.io has 5 DR and brings in 500 uniq users per day organically" — a maker whose 5-DR site draws 500 daily users

Operators of the receiving end described the cost of making such lists public. The founder of a podcast search engine explained why mass-submission ruins directories:

"we have to delete tons of fake podcasts submitted to our site… why do people create fake podcasts? they want to get backlinks from all podcast directories" — Wenbin Fang, maker of the ListenNotes podcast search engine

The honest use is the small web, not the SEO juice

Not everyone was cynical. One reader spent an evening submitting his Goodreads alternative across the list and called it "a great starting point," CAPTCHA gauntlet and all. And a longtime maintainer of his own metalist offered the wholesome version - blogroll.org, indieblog.page, marginalia-search.com, wiby.me - directories for personal sites rather than backlink farming. The split runs through the whole thread: the same list is a growth-hacker shortcut to one half and a small-web revival to the other. The takeaway is quieter than the upvote count suggests - the move still works for getting a personal project seen, but the SEO rationale printed on the tin expired years ago.