Status: discontinued. SiteHub is no longer running. The service was shut down in 2026, and the domain it lived on, sitehub.life, no longer resolves — as of September 2026 it has no working name servers at all. You cannot submit a site, and any listing that existed there is gone. This article stays online as a record of something I built and operated, not as a directory you can still join.
SiteHub was a link platform where anyone could register their own site and be found from it. This is what I was trying to solve, what I actually shipped, and what came out of running it.
Originally published in Japanese on November 4, 2025. This English version was written in September 2026.
Why I thought a site directory was worth building in 2025
I work as a freelance engineer in Japan, building systems and websites and running several media sites of my own. That work means looking at a lot of other people’s sites.
The same pattern kept showing up. Sites nobody discovers. Sites that never rank. Sites with genuinely good content and almost no inbound links pointing at them. The problem was rarely quality — it was that a well-made independent site can now sit online for years without anyone stumbling into it, because the paths that used to lead people to small sites have largely closed.
So I built SiteHub: no topic restriction, anyone could register their site with minimal friction, and the point was to create somewhere sites could connect to and be discovered from.
Worth saying plainly, since this is the part that dates the project: the web directory is an old idea, and the reasons it faded the first time did not go away. I built it anyway to see what a modern version would actually do.
What I actually built
Registration in one short form
Submitting a site took a URL, a title, a thumbnail, a category, and a description — and of those, the title, thumbnail, and description were fetched automatically, so in practice you pasted a URL and picked a category.
There was no editorial review queue. Submissions published immediately, which built the link structure between registered sites without a human bottleneck in the middle.
That trade-off is the whole design in miniature: auto-publishing is what made the thing usable, and it is also what an open directory has to defend against hardest.
Categories and tags for browsing
Registered sites were organized into categories so visitors could browse a subject and move sideways from one site to another, rather than only arriving at a single listing and leaving.
OGP, structured data, and links
Each listing page generated its own OGP image and carried structured data, with the link structure between listings designed in rather than incidental. This was the most technically interesting part of the build and the piece that turned out to be most reusable afterwards.
What registering was supposed to get you
- An inbound link. Your URL appeared on SiteHub, creating a link between registered sites.
- A route in. Visitors could reach your site through the site list, categories, search, or the picked-out listings.
- Free, no approval queue. Registration cost nothing at the time and did not wait on review.
One honest caveat about that first point, which I would state more carefully today than I did in 2025: links from an open, auto-publishing directory are not a reliable ranking strategy, and search engines have discounted this class of link for a long time. The realistic value was the second item — an additional path by which a person might find your site.
The three-step flow, as it worked then
1. Enter your site details
A URL — a website, a blog, a social profile — plus a title, description, and category.
2. Register and publish
Listings went live immediately, with categorization and OGP generation handled automatically.
3. Get found
Visitors discovered listings through categories, tags, search, and the featured selections.
How it was run
Moderation. Listings published automatically as a rule, and owners could edit or delete their own entries afterwards without going through me.
Pricing. It was free for the whole time it operated.
What I took away from it
SiteHub was an attempt to test two things: whether an independent site can be given a workable entry point for discovery, and how you build link structure between sites without an editorial gatekeeper.
The parts that kept paying off were the mechanics — automatic OGP generation, structured data, automated categorization, and the ownership model for letting people manage their own listings after publication. That work fed directly into how I build and run sites now.
It started from a line I still like: your hub for connecting the web. It is a record of building and running that, and nothing more — the service is closed and the domain is gone.