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Aug 12, 2026

Do SaaS Directory Backlinks from G2 and Capterra Help SEO?

A single loose chain link resting on a shelf that belongs to someone else, beside a small sheet of paper standing on its own solid base

You have a claim-your-profile tab open on G2, maybe one on Capterra too, and a weekend that could go to this or to the feature you promised someone. Every roundup sells these listings on the backlink. That half of the pitch is the half nobody can verify for you, and the half you can verify yourself in thirty seconds.

The real question is whether the link moves rankings. A plain link (dofollow) has no special rel attribute, and search engines may pass ranking signals along it. A link marked rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc" is flagged by the host site as one it does not want counted that way. It comes down to what sits on that anchor tag.

In September 2019, Google announced that nofollow, sponsored and ugc are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search, rather than a strict instruction to ignore the link. Sponsored and ugc were introduced in that announcement, and nofollow became a hint for crawling and indexing purposes from March 1, 2020.

Read the current documentation on qualifying outbound links: links marked with these attributes “will generally not be followed”, and the word “hint” does not appear on that page. A hint is not a promise. Never budget a listing on the assumption that the link passes value. Google’s spam policies also list “low-quality directory or bookmark site links” as an example of link spam, alongside buying or selling links for ranking purposes.

Why nobody can tell you today whether G2 or Capterra is dofollow

Public roundups of “SaaS directories with dofollow backlinks” disagree with each other about the same platforms, some listing Capterra as dofollow and others as nofollow. They cannot all be right, and the right ones go stale when platforms change their rules. Platforms also consolidate: G2 announced on January 29, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner, so listing on all four is less diversification than it looks.

Open a competitor’s live profile page. Right click the outbound link to their website, choose Inspect, and read the <a> tag in the elements panel. If nofollow, sponsored or ugc appears in the rel attribute, that is your answer for that link on that day. No rel attribute means a plain followable link.

Two gotchas. Check the actual profile page, not a search or category listing: those are often built differently. And check the tier you will really be on: Capterra’s pay-per-click service description defines a sponsored profile as an enhanced profile that appears in sponsored placements and links to the vendor’s landing page, with the vendor paying for the resulting clicks.

The link may also not exist for you. As G2 announced in 2023, linking directly to your website is now exclusively available on upgraded profiles, and CTAs and leads are upgrade-only too. Confirm the current terms, since tiers change. If a free profile gives you no outbound link at all, the dofollow debate is moot.

Directory profiles often rank for “[your product] reviews” style queries. A claimed, well-filled profile is a result you influence when a buyer searches your name, followed link or not, and a click from someone already comparing tools is warm traffic.

The cost is ownership. That profile and its reviews sit on someone else’s domain: you do not control the layout, the competitors shown beside you, or whether a feature you rely on moves behind a paid tier later. A page you own, with proper review markup, is the version nobody can gate.

Where a directory listing fits next to reviews you own

Claim the free profiles, give them one focused afternoon, invite a few real customers to review you there, then stop. It is a branded-SERP and referral play, not a link play, and never worth a paid upgrade bought for a link attribute nobody can confirm. Recurring effort belongs on a URL you control: the argument is in using customer reviews to improve SEO, the build in a dedicated testimonials page.

That is what XLens Review does. Reviews arrive through a public form (1 to 5 rating, optional comment and name, protected by Cloudflare Turnstile) and wait in a moderation queue until you approve them, since manual approval is the default. Approved ones appear on a server-rendered, indexable page at getxlens.com/review/your-slug that carries JSON-LD for the product, plus an aggregate rating once approved reviews exist.

The link direction is worth spelling out, given everything above. The copy-paste badge creates a followable link running from your site to that review page. The link pointing the other way, from the review page back to your product site, carries rel="nofollow noopener". So XLens hands you no backlink either. It hands you a crawlable page of real proof that ranks for your name. Free for one product, 1.99 euro per month for up to five.