DR 0 to 42 in 33 days: 106 followed directory links

submitmap.com was registered on 7 August 2026. Ahrefs rated it 0, which is what a domain nobody links to is rated. On 9 September it measured 42. Nothing happened to it in between except directory submissions: no press, no guest posts, no paid links, one Hacker News story and one post on dev.to. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' metric and every figure here is read from their endpoint on the day stated, not from a directory's marketing page.

The claim this measures is the one every submission service makes: "founders go from DR 0 to 20 or 30 within four to six weeks." We wanted to know whether that is true, what it takes, and which part of the work does nothing.

The three points we have

Three points, not a curve. We started recording customers' ratings daily on 3 September and, embarrassingly, never added our own domain to the list, so the shape between the points is unknown. The daily series starts now and this page will carry it.

What was behind the number on 9 September

Between 10 August and 8 September we submitted the site to 435 directories, in a spreadsheet's worth of rows, one per submission, each recording what the form asked for and where the listing ended up. On 9 September the rows stood like this:

So the 42 rests on 106 followed links. Their median directory rating is 40: 38 of them come from directories at DR 50 or above, 42 from DR 30 to 49, and 26 from below 30. None of the 106 was paid for. Two things were paid for instead, and they are the actual cost of the number.

What the 106 links cost

Eighty-one of the hundred and six wanted their badge on our site before the link went live or before it became dofollow. Our footer is now a marquee of other directories' logos, and taking one down unpublishes the listing, so they stay. That is the trade: a followed link from a DR 70 domain, in exchange for a followed link back to it from ours. The service pitch never mentions it because a done-for-you run cannot deploy your footer.

The ten highest-rated followed links, and what each one asked for:

Two of those ten only exist for MCP servers, which we happen to be. A product that is not one has eight.

The 41 that added nothing

Forty-one live listings pass a nofollow link, and they include the biggest names on the sheet: Trustpilot at DR 94, the official MCP Registry at 91, Devpost at 88, F6S at 83, Indie Hackers at 81. They took the same forms, the same accounts and in some cases the same badges as the followed ones, and they contributed nothing to the rating. Some of them are worth having for other reasons; Indie Hackers sends people. But a run that counts rows counts these as wins, and the number does not.

This is the whole difference between our 435 rows and the $249 run we bought in May for another product and audited in August: 229 rows, 30 live, 9 followed links, and no way to tell which. A followed link is the only part of a listing that moves the rating, and it is the part a volume service does not separate out.

Pace, and what is still in the queue

The right-hand column is what has gone live from each week's submissions, which is why the recent weeks look worse: 268 rows are still in a review queue or on a launch calendar, and 150 of those will pass a followed link if they land. Some calendars run to November. The rating on 9 September is from roughly a third of the work paying out; what the rest does is the series this page will keep.

What 42 buys, and what it does not

Search Console on 4 September: 27 clicks on 4,860 impressions in 28 days, dozens of first-page positions for other directories' names, and zero impressions for our own brand on Google. Bing ranks the brand first. A rating is an input, not a result, and a month-old domain with a rating of 42 still has a month-old domain's standing with Google.

Two more things worth knowing before you chase the number. Only 11 of the 829 directories we tracked on the day of writing publish a domain rating floor, and the highest is 30, so a rating is almost never what gets a submission accepted. And Ahrefs' own scale is logarithmic: the first thirty points are the cheap ones, which is exactly why a service can promise them.

The caveat, as a section

We are a directory of directories, so we knew which lanes were free, which links were followed, and which forms hide the free tier, before we filled the first one. Our own product is also an MCP server, which opened two DR 70 doors that a normal SaaS does not have. And a new domain gets the steep part of the curve: 0 to 42 says nothing about what the same links would do to a site already at 35. Read the three points as a measurement of the claim, not as a promise.

If you want the list rather than the story: the directories at DR 50 and above, the ones that are free, dofollow and want no badge, and the dofollow list with what each charges for the privilege.