The Mac App Index badge

Why we ask for a badge

A standard listing on Mac App Index costs nothing. In return, we ask developers to put a small badge on their website that links back to their app's page here. The badge tells your visitors where else they can find and upvote your app, and the link helps new people discover the directory. The more people use the directory, the more visitors each listed app gets.

The badge is optional if you choose a paid listing instead. Paid listings without the badge are being prepared and will appear on the submit page when they are ready.

How to add it

1. Submit your app. After you send the form you land on your app's listing options page.
2. Pick a style (light or dark) and a size (regular, 56px tall, or small, 40px tall). The page shows a preview of the exact badge.
3. Copy the code and paste it into a page on your app's website. The footer of your homepage or the app's own page works well. It has to be on the same site as the website you submitted.
4. Enter the address of that page and press Verify badge. You need to be signed in with the account you submitted from.

The embed code

The code is a plain link around an image. This is what it looks like for an app whose page is /apps/your-app, in the light style:

<a href="https://macappindex.com/apps/your-app?ref=badge" target="_blank" title="Your App on Mac App Index"><img src="https://macappindex.com/apps/your-app/badge.svg?theme=light&height=56" alt="Your App on Mac App Index" width="224" height="56" /></a>

And the small dark version:

<a href="https://macappindex.com/apps/your-app?ref=badge" target="_blank" title="Your App on Mac App Index"><img src="https://macappindex.com/apps/your-app/badge.svg?theme=dark&height=40" alt="Your App on Mac App Index" width="160" height="40" /></a>

Use the code from your own listing options page, which already has your app's address in it. The image is served from https://macappindex.com/apps/your-app/badge.svg and accepts two parameters: theme (light or dark) and height in pixels. The width follows the height.

You can restyle the surrounding HTML. Two things must stay as they are:

• the link must point to macappindex.com (your app's page here is best);
• the link must not carry rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc".

How we verify it

When you press Verify, our server downloads the page you entered, follows up to five redirects, and looks for a link to macappindex.com. If the page is built with JavaScript or blocks simple requests, we try again with a rendering service (Firecrawl) that loads the page the way a browser would.

There are three possible results:

• Found. The badge is verified and the app joins the review queue.
• Nofollow. We found the link, but it has a nofollow, sponsored or ugc attribute. Remove the attribute and verify again.
• Missing or unreachable. We could not find the link, or could not open the page. Check that the page is public and the code is published, then try again.

Keeping the badge up

The badge needs to stay on your site for as long as the app is listed for free. Once a day we re-check the pages of verified free listings, oldest check first. If the link has been removed or changed to nofollow, the verification is withdrawn. A page that is temporarily down does not count against you. To restore a lost verification, put the link back and verify again from your listing options page.

Our checker identifies itself in the user agent as "Mac App Index badge check". If your firewall blocks it, allow that user agent or let us know.

Questions

If verification keeps failing on a page where you can see the badge, write to [email protected] with the page address. The rules for listings are on the editorial policy page.