Getting Listed on Show My Sites: A Practical Checklist

Show My Sites is a simple showcase: submit a site, get a card, link out. The whole category in one sentence.

The short answer

The submission is the easy part. What decides whether Show My Sites was worth the ten minutes is whether the listing gets published, whether the outbound link is followed, and whether the page is indexed six weeks later.

What Show My Sites is

A site showcase where submitted websites are published with short descriptions and category tags. The submission form is on showmysites.com.

Submitting, in order

1. Choose the product URL, not the root
2. Write a one-line description
3. Choose the category
4. Submit and log
5. Verify the link

Before you touch the form

Submit the product page rather than the homepage if the product lives in a subdirectory. Deep links are what visitors actually need.

What it is good for

General and niche directories give a young domain a citation that persists for years, which matters when the domain currently has almost none.

What a showcase can and cannot do

It puts a URL in front of people who collect URLs. That is useful the first time a domain has few inbound links and close to useless afterwards, because a showcase audience is not shopping for software. Judge the submission by whether the link gets indexed, not by the visits it sends.

One thing that catches people out

Showcase directories publish whatever URL you give them, including the one you forgot to update. A homepage that has since been rebuilt, a subdomain with an expired certificate or a staging link all get published and indexed as if they were the product.

Checking what you actually got

• Click the published link from a private window
• Check the title and description as they appear, not as you wrote them
• Confirm no redirect chain sits between the listing and the page
• See whether the listing appears in the category index
• Re-check in a quarter, since showcases rarely update themselves

Where it fits in a launch plan

Place it after the three directories that matter most in your category and before the long tail. The first three teach you what forms check; the long tail is the same form twenty more times.

Deep link, not homepage

Submit the page a visitor should see: the product page, the pricing page or the signup flow. The homepage is often a marketing surface that makes people work to find the thing.

A showcase is a link, and a link to the wrong page wastes the only visit it produces.

What a showcase audience does

People browse showcases to see what exists. They collect URLs, occasionally save one, rarely buy.

That is fine if the goal is a citation and a small amount of discovery. It is a poor fit if the goal is conversion.

Indexation over visits

The measurable outcome is whether the page gets indexed and whether the link is followed. Visits from a showcase are statistically insignificant.

Judge the submission on the two structural facts and stop looking at the referral report.

When showcases are worth it

When the domain has few referring domains and needs breadth, or when the product is visual enough that a card does it justice.

They are also cheap to batch, which makes them a reasonable entry in the tier rather than a project.

The card and the URL

A showcase card is a title, a short description and an image. The URL is what carries the value, so keep it canonical and free of parameters.

Any tracking on the link belongs on your side, in analytics attribution, not in the submitted URL.

Checking the link

Open the listing, confirm the destination, and look at the anchor. Record the attribute in the row.

Two minutes, and it is the only quality control a showcase offers.

The ceiling of a showcase

One referring domain, a permanent card and almost no traffic. That is the whole return.

Below the ceiling it is useful coverage; above it, nothing you do to the listing changes the outcome.

One description for forty showcases

Showcases are identical in function, so the copy should be identical too. Write it once at card length and paste it.

Only the URL varies, and it should be the same canonical string every time.

FAQ

Are showcase sites worth it?

As cheap citations in bulk, yes. As a channel, no — their audiences are tiny.

Put one submission on a calendar

A showcase is a citation; a launch is a schedule. SaasHunt publishes SaaS launches at 08:00 UTC with a dofollow listing, from $9.9.

Submit your product

Related reading

• Product Hunt Alternatives
• Directories to Submit Your Startup to in 2026
• SaaS Directories: A Founder’s Guide