Prospecting is the most important and overlooked aspect of link building. People think the more prospects they can round up, the better. Just grab as many prospects as you can for your outreach campaign, and hopefully a handful of them will give us a link.
This is not smart.
Aside from dealing with a lot of rejection (which is not fun for anyone), scattergun outreach could end up causing you some serious issues further down the line. I’ve learnt from previous mistakes where I’ve emailed someone trying to get a link without really taking the time to consider if they were a good prospect. Then, 12 months down the line when I realise I need to work with their publication, I’m fucked because they remember me as the guy who sent them that shitty email.
This is a big mistake, especially if you’re link-building on behalf of a brand that has a good reputation.
So yes, I know it’s a thrill to paste a whole bunch of prospects into a spreadsheet and imagine all of the links you could be getting. But if you’re finding that your current link building efforts are not yielding as many links as you’d hoped (or destroying potential relationships), it’s probably worth thinking a bit more about the prospects you’re going after.
Here are some tips I’ve picked up over the years which work for me:
Find sites who have no interest in selling links.
How often are your prospects asking you for payment when you try and get a link from them?
Think about how the sites you’re contacting are monetizing their traffic, and consider whether or not they’ll likely make you pay for a link insert. News publications and blogs are more likely to ask you to cough up, so maybe think twice before adding them to your prospect list. This is especially true if the site has an advertising section. A few exceptions here would be if you can find a specific ‘corrections’ contact on the site, or if the site seems to exist purely to provide information rather than punt ‘sponsored posts’ out on a regular basis.
Sites which aren’t interested in selling links might include – websites of small businesses, hotels, B&Bs etc., university/college type websites, websites about an event, websites about a movie or tv show, council websites, club/community/church websites, lots of examples there.
The theory behind this is pretty simple. A search engine will ask: If you’ve had to pay for this link, how valuable, then, is it to our user? Let’s exclude the PBN links from spam websites (that will leave you at risk of a penalty). If search engines identify a website whose business model is based on asking for money for inclusions, why would they provide great results? The outcome is usually what happened to Reach PLC who saw a huge drop in traffic, partly down to their less-than-scrupulous publishing rules.
Find websites that offer real value in the niche you’re in, and search engines/ AI search will reward you in return.
Find sites linking to completely changed content (triple C approach)
This is a personal favourite of mine, because it’s hard to scale and for anyone willing to put in the effort (like me), it can yield great results. It’s essentially a variation of broken link buidling – but instead of looking for 404 pages, we’re looking for sites which have changed content completely.
The reason it’s hard to scale is that you’ll need to actually stumble across these sites rather than actively collect a list of them – tools can help you find 404 pages pretty easily, but 301/302 redirects are a dime a dozen, and most of them don’t mean a site has completely changed content. It probably just means they’ve redirected to https:// or something like that.
But if you can find examples of sites or pages which have completely changed content, you’ll also find a bunch of really good prospects. People aren’t always that bothered about updating a broken link because anyone clicking on the link won’t be offended or confused, they’ll just figure out that the page or site has been removed. But if someone were to click on a link thinking it’s one thing and then be taken to something completely irrelevant, that’s an issue for the siteowner. Because now they could be seen as endorsing that content, and if that content is, say, porn related, it could actually land them in trouble.
As I say, you’ll typically only stumble across these types of opportunities. But if you want to actively find some prospects you could try things like this:
- search for “this site may be hacked” “your niche” – you’ll find people on forums or blogs talking about sites in your niche which have now been hacked. You could grab one of those hacked sites and put it into ahrefs/semrush, then inform the people still linking to it that the site has become unsafe and offer your page about the same topic as a replacement.
- search for site:wikipedia.org “official website” “archived” “your niche” – same as before but maybe even a little better – here we’re looking for wikipedia pages which include official websites being linked to via the Wayback Machine. If this is the case then it either means the site no longer exists, or that it has changed content and the editor of the Wikipedia page had to link to an older version of the site.
The smart conclusion
Again, good prospecting really just boils down to whether or not you’re helping the prospect, and whether or not the prospect actually wants your help. Lots of online news publications and blogs couldn’t care if their content is outdated or if their pages are full of broken links, because many of these publications have no editorial integrity. They simply exist to churn out as much content as possible, so don’t be offended if they don’t seem interested in adding a link to the guide you worked extra hard on.
Instead, focus on sites ran by people who actually have integrity, and to which the accuracy of the information within their content will be of importance to them. There are less of these types of people out there, but they’re more likely to link to you. And if we could spend more time helping them rather than paying blogs and news publications for links, the world might be a better place.
Anyway, that’s enough ranting. This article turned from a nice little reminder to prospect smarter into a fully blown link building guide. I just can’t help myself sometimes.
Written by Sam Williamson.
