How to check that a directory really links to you

Start with the URL of your own listing page, the one with your product’s name in the address. A link on the directory’s homepage or a “new today” feed moves down as newer products arrive, so it isn’t the one to check. Open the listing in a private window while signed out, so you see what a visitor sees and not an owner’s preview.

Write the URL down exactly as it appears in the address bar after the page loads, including www and any trailing slash. Every check below uses it.

A browser gives you two views of a page, and they can differ:

• View Source (Ctrl+U, or Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) shows the HTML the server sent.
• Inspect (right-click the link) shows the page after JavaScript has run, including anything scripts added.

Search View Source for your domain. If the link is there, every crawler sees it on its first visit. If it appears only in Inspect, it was added by JavaScript. Google says it can crawl such a link when it is a real <a> element with an href (source), but only after the page has been through its rendering queue, and it notes that not all bots run JavaScript (source).

The same check from a terminal:

curl -sL "https://directory.example/products/your-product" | grep -i "yoursite.com"

Or paste the listing URL and your domain into the backlink checker. It fetches the page without running JavaScript and lists every link to your domain or its subdomains, with the anchor text and the rel of each one. If your domain appears in the source but not as a normal link, it says that instead, which usually means plain text or a link built by script.

Once you’ve found the <a> element, look at three things.

Where the href points

It should be your own address, such as https://yoursite.com/. Tracking parameters on the end, like ?ref=directory, still count as a direct link. Note them anyway, because they create a second URL for your homepage. Make sure your homepage’s canonical tag points to the clean address; see canonical tag mistakes.

If the href is on the directory’s domain, such as /go/your-product or /out?id=123, the link goes through a redirect. See what it returns:

curl -sI "https://directory.example/go/your-product"

Read the status line and the Location header. Google treats 301 and 308 as permanent redirects, which signal that the target should be canonical, and 302, 303 and 307 as temporary ones, which don’t (source). If the response is a 200 and the page forwards you with JavaScript, Google sees the redirect only when rendering succeeds. Then open the directory’s /robots.txt and look for a Disallow line covering the redirect path. A crawler that isn’t allowed to fetch the URL never learns where it leads.

What the rel says

No rel, or one with only noopener or noreferrer, is a followed link. nofollow, sponsored and ugc each ask search engines not to count it. What each rel value means covers the details. Compare what you find with what the directory promised.

What the anchor is

Your product name as text is ideal. An image link with no alt text, or an empty link, gives search engines nothing to describe your page with. The backlink checker shows the anchor it found for each link, and the alt text when the link is an image.

A followed link on a page that search engines leave out is worth little. Four things can keep a listing page out.

• A noindex in the HTML. Look in View Source for <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. Google drops such a page from results entirely, whoever links to it (source). A nofollow or none in the same tag tells crawlers not to follow any link on the page (source).
• A noindex in the headers. The same rules can be sent as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, which never shows up in View Source. Check with curl -sI "https://directory.example/products/your-product".
• A robots.txt block. Open /robots.txt on the directory’s domain and see whether a Disallow rule covers the listing’s path. A blocked page can’t be crawled, so its links can’t be read, though Google says the bare URL can still appear in results without a description (source).
• A canonical that points elsewhere. Find <link rel="canonical"> in the source. It should be the listing’s own URL. If it names the homepage or a category page, the directory is telling Google that this page is a duplicate of that one, and Google treats the tag as a strong signal (source).

The indexability checker runs all four on one URL. It reports the status code and redirect chain, the robots.txt line that matches for Googlebot, noindex and nofollow in the meta tags and in the X-Robots-Tag header, the canonical from the tag or a Link header and whether it points to the page itself, and whether the site’s sitemap lists the URL. Items that block indexing are shown in red.

Is the listing in the directory’s sitemap?

A sitemap tells search engines which pages a site considers important, and Google asks sites to list the URLs they want in search results (source). Look for a Sitemap: line in the directory’s robots.txt, or try /sitemap.xml, then search the file for your listing’s URL. If the file lists other sitemap files instead of pages, open the one that looks like it holds products.

Being listed doesn’t guarantee crawling or indexing (source), and a missing entry doesn’t prove the opposite. But a directory that leaves product pages out of its sitemap while including categories and blog posts is telling you which pages it cares about.

Is the page in Google’s index?

Search Console’s URL Inspection tool only works on URLs in a property you have verified (source), so you can’t inspect a page on someone else’s site. The nearest check is a search:

site:directory.example/products/your-product

A result means the page is indexed. No result is weaker evidence: Google says the site: operator doesn’t necessarily return every indexed URL (source). A new listing may also simply not have been crawled yet. Try again in two weeks before drawing a conclusion.

A link that passes today can change. Listings get removed, a redesign moves links into script, a followed link is switched to nofollow when a badge comes off or a paid period ends, and a site can add noindex to old pages. Keep one row per listing:

• Listing URL and the date it went live.
• In the raw HTML: yes or no.
• Href: direct, or through a redirect (and which status code).
• Rel value.
• Indexable: yes or no, with the reason.
• Found with a site: search: yes or no, and the date.

Rerun the checks after a month and again after a quarter. If something changed for the worse, write to the directory with the listing URL, what you found and what you expected. A message like “my listing at this URL now has rel=nofollow on the website link; it was followed on 3 October” gets a faster answer than “my backlink is gone”.

Your own Search Console is the last place to look. Its Links report lists sites that link to you, but it is a sample and not a complete list (source), so a directory missing from it hasn’t necessarily been ignored. Why new backlinks take time to show up covers how long the tools take.