#(you need to understand the amount of wikis I had to manually look through for this cleaning process)
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*laughs in still 923 characters in my data set after cleaning up all the duplicate names* 🙃 (down from 975 (unique) old names)
#ship stats#coding#I love csv files they're so satisfying to look at#I'm like THIS 🤏 close to visualising this first version aaaah#I've assigned and completed/corrected (as much as possible) the demographic data#(you need to understand the amount of wikis I had to manually look through for this cleaning process)#now turning everything into csv files again so I can LOOK AT EM BETTER#and then need to look into vis softwares to use o.o#we had bootcamp graduation today also!! 🎉 I am officially a trained data engineer#what will I do with my time now until I have hunted myself a job? hoPEFULLY FINALLY EDIT MY REMAINING MATRIARCHY VIDEOS Q.Q
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Indexing and Linking with GSA Search Engine Ranker
Table of ContentsExciting GSA SER video tutorials How To Use GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial To Desire GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial - Free Guides Extreme GSA SER tutorials Indexing and Linking with GSA Search Engine Ranker
Set the HTML timeout to 120 seconds to make certain GSA SER handles to register accounts on more complex websites. Use proxies for search engines constantly. Usage proxies for submission as well. Tick the option to stop tasks on no active proxies and then to reboot projects on active proxies.
They will be resurrected not long after. Emulate GSA Captcha Breaker as some other captcha resolving service, for instance AntiGate, and link it to GSA SER that method. Usage ReverseProxies OCR as a 2nd captcha resolving service. Include it through GSA Captcha breaker's menu. GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial. This will fix hard captchas such as ReCaptcha.
Uncheck the choice so you can stop getting all the captcha windows to popup. Uncheck the alternative. A 3rd party indexation service works, but not necessary. We do not utilize any. We just allow the lower tiers to function as indexers for the upper tiers' backlinks. Uncheck the option.
Conserve just the site lists to increase the efficiency of GSA SER and besides, these are the lists you really require in order to run this software more efficiently. Examine the alternative if you will be utilizing a great deal of PR filters on your jobs. Backup your website notes regularly, just in case.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial - Updated 2020
Use and daily. Usage whenever you begin seeing way a lot of and messages in the GSA Search Engine Ranker log. Tick the checkbox to make sure that SER is not attempting to send backlinks when your machine has no access to the Internet. Use SERengines to produce some actually nice Web 2.
Use GSA Search Engine Ranker's Scheduler to run only a specific amount of tasks at a time. Beneficial if you do not have the capacity to run numerous tasks on your SER circumstances i. e. not sufficient proxies, inadequate RAM, weak CPU, and so on. Always inspect out the version history after an update to see what's changed and what's brand-new worldwide of this GSA SEO tool.
It's well worth it. Group your jobs into job groups for a a lot easier navigation through GSA SER. Develop an excellent and smart calling convention for both your tasks and your task groups. Set the concern of all of your tasks to begin at the most affordable so that you can quickly offer more attention to delayed projects later on.
Erase Target URL History so that the project can start getting target URLs from the top of the website lists. GSA Search Engine Ranker video tutorials. Beware not to erase your account information. We will look at Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3+ optimal configurations for your GSA SER jobs. Post, Directory, Social Bookmark, Social Media Network, SEREngines posts and profiles, and Wikis.
How To Use GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial To Desire
youtube
1% precise match, 4% partial match and LSI, 50% branding, 25% generic, 20% naked URLs. If you will be running the Tier 1 towards a parasite website i. e. YouTube, you can simply move the 50% from branding to the partial match and LSI anchors. backlinks at random areas, 0 2 authority URLs, 0 2 images or 0 1 videos.
Tutorials - GSA Manuals and Docus - GSA SEO
Article, Online Forum, Image Comment, Microblog, Social Bookmark, Social Media, Wikis, SEREngines posts and profiles (optional). 5% precise match, 25% LSI, 40% generic, 30% naked URLs. backlinks at random places with 33% utilizing the option, 0 1 authority URLs, 1 3 images or 1 2 videos (GSA SER reviews). No limit on the PR, let the link building monster toss some link juice to the Tier 1 backlinks.
Get Kick-ass GSA Search Engine Ranker Help at - Asia Virtual Solutions
30% precise match, 70% LSI. Generate the content for your GSA SER projects utilizing Kontent Maker and its pre-defined Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3+ design templates. Integrating it with WordAI's effective spinning residential or commercial properties and occasionally mixing it up with Spin Rewriter, offers you the material you will need.
If you got the time, you can likewise add a manual touch to make it even better. Check the option and likewise add a few exceptions in the location, for instance,, and so on. Depending on the age of the website, set up the amount of backlinks enabled to be developed each day.
How To Build Your Own Auto Accept List With GSA SER
e. the upper Tier they point at. No point in connecting to Social Bookmarks and other nofollow platforms. Yes, they are great for indexation and social evidence, but not a lot for link juice (at this moment in the space-time continuum). Inspect the checkbox from the tab to make sure there is randomness in the backlinks created towards your customer URLs.
Use for the choice. setting should be examined The setting ought to be set to. We do not use online search engine to scrape target URLs, so uncheck all search engines by default, 8 are picked. Only usage website lists as sources of target URLs of your project. This will escalate your VpM and the total efficiency of GSA SER.

Learn How To Use GSA Search Engine Ranker
We never ever utilize scheduled posts, only special domains. Just when it comes to producing Tier 1 jobs with SEREngines posts and profiles specifically. Only then do we enable scheduled posting. Check all types of backlinks to develop. Examine the alternative and set it to at least 900 seconds. Usage Yahoo emails.
Always evaluate your project prior to you start it to make sure all is excellent. Do not select the Web 2. GSA Search Engine Ranker training. 0 engine type ever, since it is not supported anymore. Usage SEREngines instead (GSA Search Engine Ranker manual). This was the response I received from the SEREngines support when I asked why I had many mistake messages in my log for my Web 2.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial - Latest Post
You can inspect the example link pyramids we have actually developed, that are enhanced for GSA SER by going to our Providers page. Another extremely crucial thing you ought to do is go to the folder inside your GSA Online Search Engine Ranker setup folder, and modify the following. dat files (these are default texts which GSA SER will use if you do not explicitly define your own content for your tasks): about_yourself.
dat remarks. dat comments_forum. information comments_guestbook. dat comments_guestbook_german. dat comments_image. dat Produce your own highly spun material and change the one currently existing within these files. Beware because in some of them, there are macros utilized, so initially, have a look at this and ended up being conscious of the approach GSA SER usages by default, and only then exchange them with your own material.
Change these on a weekly or monthly basis to leave no footprints on search engines. gsa search engine ranker video Tutorials. This is incredibly crucial otherwise you risk leaving material the like countless other uninformed GSA SER users, which will one day come back and bite you on the ass. Not the other SER users, however the effects.
First of all, I desire you to understand that if you actually do not have the time to construct your own lists and filter them the right way, you will need to take benefit of the services of some GSA SER site lists company check out this case study of the top 4 GSA SER website lists providers which will help you make an informed decision or take an appearance at our site lists - gsa Search engine ranker manual.
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GSA software verified lists set up guide
How To Build Your Own Auto Accept List With GSA SER
Table of ContentsHow To Use GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial To Desire GSA Search Engine Ranker Guides - SER Verified Lists How to use GSA Search Engine Ranker correctely GSA Search Engine Ranker and VPS – The Ultimate ... How To Build Your Own Auto Accept List With GSA SER
Set the HTML timeout to 120 seconds to ensure GSA SER handles to sign up accounts on more complex websites. Usage proxies for search engines constantly. Use proxies for submission also. Tick the option to stop jobs on no active proxies and after that to restart tasks on active proxies.
They will be resurrected not long after. Replicate GSA Captcha Breaker as some other captcha fixing service, for instance AntiGate, and link it to GSA SER that method. Use ReverseProxies OCR as a second captcha solving service. Include it through GSA Captcha breaker's menu. Gsa search Engine ranker video tutorials. This will solve difficult captchas such as ReCaptcha.
Uncheck the choice so you can stop getting all the captcha windows to popup. Uncheck the choice. A 3rd party indexation service is beneficial, however not obligatory. We do not use any. We merely enable the lower tiers to function as indexers for the upper tiers' backlinks. Uncheck the choice.
Conserve just the site notes to increase the performance of GSA SER and besides, these are the lists you actually require in order to run this software application more efficiently. Check the choice if you will be utilizing a great deal of PR filters on your tasks. Backup your site lists routinely, simply in case.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial
Use and every day. Usage whenever you start seeing way too many and messages in the GSA Search Engine Ranker log. Tick the checkbox to make sure that SER is not trying to submit backlinks when your maker has no access to the Internet. Usage SERengines to produce some really good Web 2.
Utilize GSA Search Engine Ranker's Scheduler to run only a particular quantity of tasks at a time. Beneficial if you do not have the capability to run many projects on your SER instance i. e. not adequate proxies, not enough RAM, weak CPU, and so on. Constantly take a look at the variation history after an update to see what's changed and what's brand-new on the planet of this GSA SEO tool.
It's well worth it. Group your tasks into job groups for a much easier navigation through GSA SER. Create a good and smart naming convention for both your jobs and your project groups. Set the priority of all of your projects to start at the most affordable so that you can quickly provide more attention to lagging tasks later.
Erase Target URL History so that the task can start getting target URLs from the top of the site lists. GSA Search Engine Ranker Video Tutorials. Beware not to erase your account information. We will take a look at Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3+ optimum setups for your GSA SER jobs. Article, Directory Site, Social Bookmark, Social Media, SEREngines posts and profiles, and Wikis.
Kick-ass GSA Search Engine Ranker video tutorials
youtube
1% exact match, 4% partial match and LSI, 50% branding, 25% generic, 20% naked URLs. If you will be running the Tier 1 towards a parasite site i. e. YouTube, you can simply move the 50% from branding to the partial match and LSI anchors. backlinks at random areas, 0 2 authority URLs, 0 2 images or 0 1 videos.

Fascinating GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorials
Post, Forum, Image Comment, Microblog, Social Bookmark, Social Network, Wikis, SEREngines posts and profiles (optional). 5% specific match, 25% LSI, 40% generic, 30% naked URLs. backlinks at random locations with 33% using the option, 0 1 authority URLs, 1 3 images or 1 2 videos (GSA Search Engine Ranker training). No limitation on the PR, let the link building monster toss some link juice down to the Tier 1 backlinks.
Get Kick-ass GSA Search Engine Ranker Help at - Asia Virtual Solutions
30% exact match, 70% LSI. Create the material for your GSA SER jobs utilizing Kontent Maker and its pre-defined Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3+ templates. Integrating it with WordAI's effective spinning residential or commercial properties and occasionally blending it up with Spin Rewriter, offers you the material you will need.
If you got the time, you can also add a manual touch to make it even much better. Check the alternative and likewise include a couple of exceptions in the area, for instance,, and so on. Depending upon the age of the website, set up the amount of backlinks enabled to be produced every day.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Ultimate Tutorial & Genuine Review
e. the upper Tier they point at. No point in linking to Social Bookmarks and other nofollow platforms. Yes, they benefit indexation and social evidence, however not a lot for link juice (at this point in the space-time continuum). Check the checkbox from the tab to make sure there is randomness in the backlinks developed towards your customer URLs.
Use for the choice. setting must be examined The setting must be set to. We do not utilize online search engine to scrape target URLs, so uncheck all search engines by default, 8 are selected. Only use website lists as sources of target URLs of your job. This will increase your VpM and the total efficiency of GSA SER.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial
We never ever utilize scheduled posts, only special domains. Just when it comes to producing Tier 1 projects with SEREngines posts and profiles specifically. Only then do we permit scheduled publishing. Examine all kinds of backlinks to produce. Check the alternative and set it to a minimum of 900 seconds. Use Yahoo e-mails.
Always evaluate your task prior to you begin it to ensure all is excellent. Do not pick the Web 2. GSA Search Engine Ranker reviews. 0 engine type ever, due to the fact that it is not supported anymore. Usage SEREngines rather (Gsa Search Engine Ranker Manual). This was the response I obtained from the SEREngines support when I asked why I had so lots of mistake messages in my log for my Web 2.
Tutorial for GSA Search Engine Ranker
You can check the example link pyramids we have actually come up with, that are optimized for GSA SER by going to our Solutions page. Another extremely important thing you ought to do is go to the folder inside your GSA Online Search Engine Ranker installation folder, and modify the following. dat files (these are default texts which GSA SER will utilize if you do not clearly specify your own material for your jobs): about_yourself.
dat comments. dat comments_forum. data comments_guestbook. dat comments_guestbook_german. dat comments_image. dat Produce your own highly spun material and replace the one already existing inside of these files. Be careful due to the fact that in a few of them, there are macros utilized, so initially, have a look at this and ended up being aware of the method GSA SER uses by default, and only then exchange them with your own content.
Change these on a weekly or regular monthly basis to leave no footprints on online search engine. GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial. This is incredibly crucial otherwise you run the risk of leaving material the like thousands of other unaware GSA SER users, which will one day return and bite you on the ass. Not the other SER users, but the repercussions.
First of all, I want you to understand that if you actually do not have the time to build your own lists and filter them the ideal method, you will need to make the most of the services of some GSA SER site lists supplier check out this case study of the leading 4 GSA SER site lists service providers which will help you make an informed choice or have a look at our site lists - GSA Search Engine Ranker video tutorials.
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Powerful GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorials
Proven GSA Search Engine Ranker video tutorials
Table of ContentsGSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial - Updated 2020 GSA Search Engine Ranker and VPS – The Ultimate ... Why Is GSA Search Engine Ranker Still Good in 2020 Tutorial: Use GSA SER for Tier 1 Link Building GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial - Updated 2020
Set the HTML timeout to 120 seconds to make sure GSA SER handles to register accounts on more complex websites. Usage proxies for online search engine constantly. Use proxies for submission as well. Tick the choice to stop jobs on no active proxies and after that to restart tasks on active proxies.
They will be resurrected not long after. Emulate GSA Captcha Breaker as some other captcha resolving service, for example AntiGate, and link it to GSA SER that way. Use ReverseProxies OCR as a second captcha resolving service. Include it through GSA Captcha breaker's menu. official site. This will solve tough captchas such as ReCaptcha.
Uncheck the alternative so you can stop getting all the captcha windows to popup. Uncheck the alternative. A third party indexation service is beneficial, however not obligatory. We do not use any. We merely enable the lower tiers to serve as indexers for the upper tiers' backlinks. Uncheck the option.
Conserve only the website notes to increase the efficiency of GSA SER and besides, these are the lists you actually need in order to run this software more effectively. Check the option if you will be using a lot of PR filters on your projects. Backup your website lists frequently, just in case.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial
Usage and every day. Usage whenever you begin seeing way too many and messages in the GSA Online search engine Ranker log. Tick the checkbox to make sure that SER is not attempting to submit backlinks when your machine has no access to the Internet. Usage SERengines to develop some truly good Web 2.
Utilize GSA Search Engine Ranker's Scheduler to run only a specific quantity of jobs at a time. Helpful if you do not have the capacity to run many jobs on your SER circumstances i. e. insufficient proxies, inadequate RAM, weak CPU, and so on. Constantly have a look at the variation history after an update to see what's changed and what's brand-new in the world of this GSA SEO tool.
It's well worth it. Group your projects into project groups for a a lot easier navigation through GSA SER. Develop an excellent and wise calling convention for both your tasks and your project groups. Set the top priority of all of your jobs to start at the least expensive so that you can easily offer more attention to lagging jobs later.
Delete Target URL History so that the task can begin getting target URLs from the top of the site lists. GSA Search Engine Ranker Video Tutorials. Be careful not to delete your account information. We will look at Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3+ optimal setups for your GSA SER tasks. Short article, Directory Site, Social Bookmark, Social Network, SEREngines posts and profiles, and Wikis.
How To Build Backlinks With GSA Search Engine Ranker
youtube
1% specific match, 4% partial match and LSI, 50% branding, 25% generic, 20% naked URLs. If you will be running the Tier 1 towards a parasite website i. e. YouTube, you can simply move the 50% from branding to the partial match and LSI anchors. backlinks at random places, 0 2 authority URLs, 0 2 images or 0 1 videos.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Review & Step By Step Tutorial
Post, Online Forum, Image Remark, Microblog, Social Bookmark, Social Media, Wikis, SEREngines posts and profiles (optional). 5% specific match, 25% LSI, 40% generic, 30% naked URLs. backlinks at random places with 33% using the option, 0 1 authority URLs, 1 3 images or 1 2 videos (GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial). No limitation on the PR, let the link building monster throw some link juice down to the Tier 1 backlinks.
Get Kick-ass GSA Search Engine Ranker Help at - Asia Virtual Solutions
30% precise match, 70% LSI. Create the material for your GSA SER jobs using Kontent Machine and its pre-defined Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3+ templates. Integrating it with WordAI's powerful spinning properties and here and there blending it up with Spin Rewriter, gives you the content you will need.
If you got the time, you can also include a manual touch to make it even much better. Examine the option and also include a couple of exceptions in the location, for example,, and so on. Depending upon the age of the website, set up the amount of backlinks permitted to be created each day.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Recommend Services
e. the upper Tier they point at. No point in connecting to Social Bookmarks and other nofollow platforms. Yes, they are excellent for indexation and social proof, however not so much for link juice (at this point in the space-time continuum). Check the checkbox from the tab to make certain there is randomness in the backlinks created towards your customer URLs.
Use for the alternative. setting should be examined The setting should be set to. We do not use search engines to scrape target URLs, so uncheck all online search engine by default, 8 are selected. Only usage site lists as sources of target URLs of your project. This will escalate your VpM and the overall performance of GSA SER.
GSA Search Engine Ranker Review & Tutorial - A New Guide ...
We never ever utilize scheduled posts, just unique domains. Only when it comes to producing Tier 1 projects with SEREngines posts and profiles exclusively. Just then do we enable arranged publishing. Inspect all types of backlinks to create. Inspect the alternative and set it to at least 900 seconds. Usage Yahoo emails.
Always test your job prior to you start it to ensure all is excellent. Do not select the Web 2. GSA Search Engine Ranker video tutorials. 0 engine type ever, since it is not supported anymore. Use SEREngines rather (GSA Search Engine Ranker Training). This was the answer I received from the SEREngines support when I asked why I had numerous mistake messages in my log for my Web 2.
Fascinating GSA Search Engine Ranker reviews
You can examine the example link pyramids we have actually developed, that are enhanced for GSA SER by going to our Services page. Another very essential thing you must do is go to the folder inside your GSA Search Engine Ranker setup folder, and edit the following. dat files (these are default texts which GSA SER will use if you do not clearly specify your own content for your jobs): about_yourself.
dat remarks. dat comments_forum. information comments_guestbook. dat comments_guestbook_german. dat comments_image. dat Produce your own extremely spun material and replace the one already existing within these files. Beware since in some of them, there are macros used, so initially, have a look at this and ended up being conscious of the approach GSA SER usages by default, and only then exchange them with your own material.
Change these on a weekly or monthly basis to leave no footprints on search engines. GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorials. This is very important otherwise you run the risk of leaving content the same as thousands of other unaware GSA SER users, which will one day return and bite you on the ass. Not the other SER users, but the effects.
First of all, I desire you to understand that if you truly don't have the time to build your own lists and filter them the right way, you will have to make the most of the services of some GSA SER website lists provider check out this case study of the leading 4 GSA SER website lists suppliers which will help you make an informed decision or take an appearance at our site lists - GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorials.
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How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
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How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
https://ift.tt/3vXsUEa
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking
0 notes
Text
How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
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How to Use SEO Tools to Qualify Sites Before the Pitch (for Non-Link Builders)
As a self-taught SEO, I struggled (and failed) for years to understand how to build links to my site and the sites of my clients. I've built my agency on writing quality content that ranks in search engines and drives sales, but the one piece of the puzzle I was missing was how to build powerful links to that content.
Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.
I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO.
It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.
Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.
A quick note for readers
I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. This process is by no means optimal, and since link building is a powerful SEO tool, you should be sure to do a lot of research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.
So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:
You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.
You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.
You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.
You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.
With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!
Qualification & audit in the pre-itch phase
No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.
Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.
The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.
Step 1: Bulk disqualifications
Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.
Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.
Disqualify various URL parameters
Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.
While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.
Remove blatant guest posting sites
Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.
To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.
Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites
At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.
It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.
Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.
Majestic website metrics
The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.
Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.
Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.
It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.
This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.
Ahrefs website metrics
Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.
This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.
Moz website metrics
Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.
I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.
Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.
My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:
Like most tools, you can get false positives, since it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review of websites before I reach out to website owners.
Step 3: Manual review
Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.
I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN or those sites that were built just to sell links based on their design and functionality.
As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume the site is only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.
Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase
No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.
The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.
Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!
0 notes