A directory worth being listed in
FeaturedLane is a launch directory for tools, apps and products of every kind. Makers submit a URL, we draft the listing from what is actually on the page, and the maker edits it into something accurate before anyone else sees it.
How a listing gets published
There is one route in, and it is free. You submit, the checks below run, and it publishes automatically once they pass.
The badge comes first, and it is required. Before we read your page or draft anything, you put our badge on your site and we load the page and check it - a real fetch, looking for a followed link back. If it is not there, or its link carries nofollow, sponsored or ugc, or the page carries a noindex/nofollow robots tag, the submission does not go any further. We check again at the last step, immediately before publishing.
Every listing is checked before it publishes. We confirm the badge is genuinely live on your site and that the description you saved matches the product. It publishes the moment those checks pass, or tells you why not; we can still pull a listing afterwards if something's wrong.
Approval and ranking are never for sale. Whether a listing publishes, and how it does on the recent-launches board or the leaderboard, is earned the same way by everyone. The one thing you can pay for is speed on the followed link - see Pricing.
Why the descriptions matter
Every listing carries an original description of between 350 and 2000 characters, written about that product and no other. Directories that recycle the same boilerplate across thousands of pages get dropped from search results, and the makers listed on them get nothing. We would rather write fewer listings properly.
Our draft is a starting point. Nothing is published until the maker has read it and made it true.
About the links
Every published listing links out to the product it describes, and every link starts nofollow. There are two ways to make it dofollow, permanently: keep the badge up and finish in the top 3 of a week's leaderboard, free, or pay once for the instant option (see Pricing). Either way, once it turns dofollow you do not have to keep winning weeks to keep it.
The badge has to stay up. We re-check every listing's site a few times a day, for as long as it is listed. If the badge comes down, or its link is changed to nofollow, the link reverts to nofollow straight away - there is no grace period. Put the badge back and it is restored just as automatically, on the next check. We email you once when it happens, with a link that re-checks on the spot; we will not chase you about the same outage twice.
Losing the badge costs you the followed link and nothing else. Your listing stays published either way.
What you can see, a crawler can see
Every page is rendered on the server, in the first response - no part of a listing is fetched by JavaScript afterwards. The recent-launches board and the leaderboard are never for sale, and staff picks are editorial, not paid.
Where we are
20 tools are published so far. If yours belongs here, it takes a couple of minutes to add.