Whether to do directories or editorial links first depends on three things you can answer today: whether a stranger could try your product, whether you have one story or decision an editor could write about, and how many hours and dollars you can spend. With no story and no budget, a handful of directory listings usually comes first. With a fresh launch or a question your buyers keep asking, one editorial article can come first and the listings fill in around it. And if nobody can use the product yet, neither comes first.
Last checked: Nov 15, 2026
Disclosure: Piece Press, which is mentioned once below, is run by the same team as SideHunt and the other Hunt and Aura++ sites. Everything said about other sites comes from a page we opened on November 15, 2026, and the time estimates are my own planning numbers, not measurements.
What are you actually choosing between?
A directory link comes from a listing: a name, a short description and a URL on a site that lists many products in the same format. An editorial link comes from an article somebody wrote about a topic, with your product named in a sentence that explains why it matters. We keep the full definitions in one place, in the EarlyHunt guide to editorial vs directory backlinks, so this post only asks the follow-up question: which one should get your first few hours?
Two sibling posts already give a fixed order. IndieHunt's year-one backlink order for a SaaS puts directories and launch platforms in months 1 and 2 and editorial articles in months 5 to 9, and the EarlyHunt guide has one editorial piece in week 3 of its first-month plan. Both are sensible defaults for a product with no story yet. This guide is for when your situation is not the default, and for deciding with a few checks instead of a rule.
If your real question is guest post versus editorial link versus niche edit, that is a different choice and we covered it in guest post vs editorial link vs niche edit.
What does each option cost in time and money?
The table puts the options side by side. The time figures are rough numbers I use when I plan, and your first pass will be slower. The money figures are what each page said on November 15, 2026.
Option | Time (my estimate) | Money, as the page said it today | What you can check afterwards |
|---|---|---|---|
Free directory listing | 20 to 40 minutes each, including the checks | $0 where a free tier exists; some sites only sell paid plans, so read the page first | Whether the page is indexed, the rel on your link, whether anyone browses the site |
Paid directory slot | About an hour to read the terms and set it up | SaaSHub's pricing page lists a featured listing at $99 a month, cancel anytime. BetaList's submit page has you pick a plan before anything is published | Referrals in your own analytics, plus the same page checks |
Editorial article on a small press site | 1 to 2 hours to gather facts and write a brief | Piece Press: free if your site credits it, a free nofollow plan with no credit, or $29 a page | The page itself, the sentence around your link, the rel, whether it is indexed |
Pitching a publication yourself | 3 to 6 hours for a first round: find the writer, read their work, write the pitch | No cash cost | Whether anyone replied, and if the piece runs, the same page checks |
The table cannot show speed: a directory listing can be live the same day, while a pitch can take weeks and end in silence. It also cannot show value. A free listing on a site nobody reads costs 30 minutes and teaches you nothing, while a $29 page that you can open, read and recheck is a cost you can price.
For a place to find directories worth the 30 minutes, the SideHunt guide to where to launch a side project is the list; this post will not repeat one.
What can you check yourself before you spend anything?
You do not need a paid tool to screen either option. Four gates cover most of what you can verify with a browser and one terminal window. A gate that fails is a reason to stop, not a reason to tweak the ask.
Gate 1: can your own site receive a link?
A link has to point at something. Google's link best practices say Google uses links as a signal for relevance and to find new pages to crawl, so a link to a page that does not explain the product wastes the placement. Before either route, your homepage should say what the product does and for whom in one sentence, one other page (pricing or a use case) should exist, and a stranger should be able to try it. If any of those is missing, fix it first.
Gate 2: is the page that carries your link crawlable and indexed?
For another site's page, the site: operator is the quick look. Google's documentation for it says an indexed URL can show up in a site: query, though that is not guaranteed, so a miss is a prompt to look further and not proof. Google's URL Inspection tool help says the URL must be in the property you have open, so you cannot inspect someone else's page there. What you can do from the outside is read the signals the page sends. Replace the address in the first line with the page that links to you, then run the next three lines:
U="https://example.com/the-page-that-links-to-you"
curl -sIL "$U" | grep -i -E '^(HTTP|x-robots-tag)'
curl -sL "$U" | grep -o -i -E '<meta[^>]*name="robots"[^>]*>|<link[^>]*rel="canonical"[^>]*>'
Read the output like this: a 200 status, no x-robots-tag line that says noindex, no robots meta that says noindex, and a canonical that points at the page itself. I ran those lines on one Piece Press explainer page on November 15, 2026 and got HTTP/2 200, a robots meta of index, follow, no x-robots-tag header and a canonical pointing at that same page. It is one page on one day, so use it to see what a clean result looks like and nothing more.
Gate 3: is it a real article for real readers?
This one costs five minutes and no tools. Open the page in a private window so you see what a stranger sees. Read it start to finish. Is the title about a question a buyer would ask? Does the body explain anything in sentences, or is it a logo grid with a paragraph? Would you send it to a customer? Open two or three other pages on the same site: do they cover your space, or are they an unrelated mix? Look for signs of readers, such as dates, an about page with real names and a visible archive. Directory listings can pass this gate too, but only if the site shows signs of people using it.
Gate 4: what does the rel on your link say?
Look at the live link, not the sales page. There is no rel="dofollow": a plain link has no rel, and nofollow, ugc and sponsored are the qualifiers to look for. Our dofollow vs nofollow guide has the full explanation and a 30-minute audit, and the free Aura++ dofollow link checker does the lookup in the browser. Searching the page source for your domain works too.
One thing to remember when you pick a source: the link on the Piece Press page I opened on November 15 carried rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow". The Piece Press pricing page says the product link is nofollow on its nofollow plan and dofollow on the other two, and I cannot see which plan that publisher picked. The lesson is general: the plan or the site's policy decides, and you confirm it after the page goes live.
Do not lean on Search Console for gate 4. Google's Links report help says the report shows a sample and does not specify whether a link is marked nofollow. And Google's spam policies list "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" among link spam examples, which is one more reason gate 3 matters for directories.
If this is you, what should you do first?
Find the row that sounds most like your week. If two rows fit, take the one nearer the top, because it asks you to fix more basic things first.
Your situation | Do this first | Hold off on |
|---|---|---|
Nobody can try the product yet (waitlist or prototype only) | Neither. Fix gate 1: a clear homepage, one more page, Search Console verified | Any link ask, paid or free |
Live, brand-new domain, no links, and a search for your name shows nothing or a different product | Directories: four to six listings with one name and one description, so your name points to your URL | Editorial pitches, until you can say what you do in two lines |
Live, no users to quote, no story, about two hours a week and $0 | Directories on free tiers, plus a link sheet with the rel and indexed status of each | Paid slots and anything that needs a story |
A launch or a change you can state in one sentence (a new capability, a new audience) | One editorial piece aimed at that story, with three or four directory listings in the same two weeks as the cheap supporting act | Mass submissions |
Customers keep asking the same buying question ("A vs B", "which plan fits a team of three") | An explainer built around that one decision, which is the format a long editorial piece does best | A generic "we launched" story |
Your buyers do not browse directories (a niche B2B tool, a trade audience) | One or two niche listings where your buyers do look, and editorial placement in places they read | General boards with thousands of unrelated listings |
You have about $30 a month and three hours a week | Free listings first, then one $29 explainer page if gates 1 to 3 pass for it, instead of waiting for a pitch to land | Recurring paid slots until a listing has sent a visitor |
Someone offers 30 links for a flat fee, or a wall of reciprocal badges | Neither. Ask for the live page URLs and run gates 2 to 4 on three of them | Paying before you have read a page |
Notice that "editorial first" appears only when you have a story or a question to answer, and "directories first" appears when you do not. That is the whole logic. An editorial piece needs something worth reading; a directory listing needs only a clear sentence. If you have a launch to write up, the SideHunt post on press release vs news story vs editorial article compares those formats.
What does a 90-day plan look like, with stop rules?
Pick the track that matches your row, then work through the same three checkpoints. The stop rules are my own rules of thumb, not thresholds anyone has measured.
Window | Directories-first track | Editorial-first track | Checkpoint and stop rule |
|---|---|---|---|
Days 1 to 30 | Pass gate 1. Write a 25-word and a 60-word description. Submit to five to eight directories that pass gate 3. Log each in a sheet | Pass gate 1. Write down three facts an editor could use (who it is for, the one thing it does better, one real number or example). Publish or place one piece. Add three listings | Open every live link in a private window and record the rel and indexed status. Drop any source whose page you cannot open or whose link is missing |
Days 31 to 60 | Add one niche listing. If a story or a repeated buyer question has appeared, start one editorial piece now | Add a second placement or a second publication if the first passed gates 2 to 4. Keep the listings accurate | In Search Console, look at which pages and queries show impressions. If a source type has sent neither a visitor nor an indexed page after six weeks, do not repeat it |
Days 61 to 90 | Keep the listings that sent visitors or got indexed, drop the rest, and plan the next quarter's editorial piece | Fill gaps with listings only where gate 3 passes, and recheck every link's rel | Write down what each source gave you in one line. Next quarter's order follows that sheet, not this post |
Recheck each live link once a month, because a link that was followed in November can carry a different rel in January, and do not count a link as a win until the page has passed gates 2 to 4.
What does an editorial article on a small press site actually involve?
If your row sent you toward editorial and a pitch is not realistic this month, a small press site is the cheapest way to get a real page to inspect. The press sites in our network publish different formats: Lede Press runs straight editorial articles, Hed Press runs news-style launch stories, Listed Press runs roundups and "best X" shortlists, and Piece Press runs a long explainer around one decision. Each one publishes an article about a customer's product, free with a link back or $29.
Here is what the Piece Press pages say today. Its editorial publications page describes a long explainer article about your product as a longer decision explainer that walks through one buyer question, with one product link in the article, using a phrase that already appears in the body. The pricing page lists a free plan that asks for a link back from your site while the page is live ("a natural link is enough, and the badge is optional"), a free nofollow plan with no site credit, and $29 a page, which adds editing for search and answer engines, a Pinterest pin and same-day publication. Free plans share five daily slots. Its home page on November 15 listed two explainers for the previous week or so, one dated November 7 and one dated November 11, so it is early days there and you should judge a page by whether you would read it, not by how busy the site looks.
The page is also upfront about limits: it says a published story does not promise a Google ranking, a citation from an answer engine, a traffic number or a movement in a rating, and that what you can verify is the page itself. That is the right way to use it. Publish, then run gates 2 to 4 on the live page, then decide whether it earned a place in your sheet. Whether to accept a link back is your call; one natural link from your own site is what the free plan asks for, and you can always take the $29 plan or the nofollow plan instead.
For how to brief a writer for that kind of piece, the SideHunt guide to getting a long-form explainer written around your product covers it.
How might two founders choose differently? (a made-up example)
Both products and both founders below are made up for illustration.
Ledgerling is an imaginary bookkeeping helper for freelance illustrators. It went live five weeks ago, has 18 users, no case study and no data worth publishing, and its founder has two hours a week. Her row is "live, no story, $0". She spends week one on gate 1 (a clearer homepage and a pricing page), then lists on six directories that passed gate 3, logs the rel and indexed status of each, and leaves editorial alone. At day 30 she opens every listing in a private window, drops one whose link never rendered, and keeps five. At day 60 she has a customer who shared a real before-and-after, which gives her a story, so editorial moves up the list for the next quarter.
Quillfold is an imaginary booking tool for small dog-grooming salons. Its founders just added WhatsApp reminders, and three customers have asked the same question in support: does it beat a paper diary for a two-person salon? Their row is "a story and a repeated buyer question". They write down three facts, brief one explainer around "paper diary vs booking tool for a two-person salon", and publish it. In the same fortnight they add three listings. They run gates 2 to 4 on the live explainer and note that the link has the rel they expected. The listings are the cheap supporting act; the explainer is the piece that answers the question a buyer types in.
What mistakes make the order not matter?
Judging by link attribute alone. A nofollow listing where your buyers browse can send customers, and a followed link on a page nobody reads sends none.
Skipping gate 1. A link to a homepage that does not explain the product wastes whichever route you chose.
Counting a link before you have opened the page. A listing that was promised and never published looks identical to a win in a spreadsheet.
Expecting a ranking. Links help people and search engines find and understand a product; when and whether that shows up in results is not something anyone can promise.
FAQ
Should I do directories or editorial backlinks first for a new SaaS?
If you have no story, no users to quote and little time, start with a few relevant directories. If you have a launch, a new capability or a question your buyers keep asking, start with one editorial piece and add a few listings around it. If nobody can try the product yet, fix your own site first.
Are directory links worth it if most of them are nofollow?
They can be. A listing helps people find the product by name and gives crawlers another page that links to you, and a nofollow link can still send visitors. Judge a directory by whether real people use it and whether the listing page is indexed, then check the rel on the live page.
How can I tell whether a page is a real article before I pay for it?
Open it in a private window and read it. It should be about a question a reader would ask, explain things in sentences, sit on a site whose other pages cover related topics, and be reachable without a login. Then run the status, robots and canonical checks above. If you would not send the page to a customer, it fails.
Is a $29 editorial page worth it compared with free listings?
They do different jobs and cost different amounts of time, so it is not a straight swap. A page of this kind explains your product in sentences and gives you something to inspect, share and recheck, while a listing mostly records that you exist. The honest test is whether you can open the live page afterwards and defend it. Nothing here promises a ranking or an answer-engine citation.
How long should I wait before judging either route?
I use 30, 60 and 90 days: check what is live and indexed at 30, look at Search Console impressions and visits at 60, and decide what to keep at 90. Those are planning checkpoints, not thresholds from any study.
What should you do this week?
Run gate 1 on your own site: one clear sentence, one more page, Search Console verified.
Find your row in the situation table and write the first move in your sheet.
Pick one source (a directory or one article opportunity) and run gates 2 to 4 on it before you submit anything.
Write the three facts an editor would need, even if you only use them for listings today.
Put the day-30, day-60 and day-90 checks in your calendar.
Once the first page is live, send yourself the link, check it again next month, and keep the sheet current. If you are launching a side project in public, SideHunt is one place to list it.