#all of the previous urls are from archived blogs so they run over into a second line

[britneysbackbitch]

my old urls are ugly now let's try testing with this one instead hehehehehehe

omg that’s soooooo sexy i love it

anyway, let’s throw some formatting in here today just for the sake of artistic curiosity

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, id hinc everti eam, rebum repudiare deterruisset et his. Ex nam natum latine sensibus, mutat dicant tamquam mei ut. An quo autem accusamus. Ne appetere recteque eum, mel facilisi pertinax no. At harum dictas aperiam his.

Pri probo animal singulis in, vim et quot erant contentiones. Mel ea dolore perfecto definiebas, autem perfecto iudicabit vis et. oratio scaevola similique eam cu, sit ex labitur adversarium, et mei graeci perfecto nominati. falli oblique placerat no vix, te cum legendos voluptatibus, denique noluisse argumentum nam cu. Semper perfecto neglegentur id nam, consul oblique philosophia an sea.

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[voical]

ok hi

so due to a lovely morning hours chat i had with @synchronzed i managed to find my old archived blog & got hit with massive nostalgia for my previous richie portrayal

it was more novel than movie-inspired since chapter 2 wasn’t out yet back then when i made the blog. what i’m writing now, for a while, lacks the character that i vividly imagined him to have and i really want to get back on it. i tried my best to run away from the ‘way too cool, way too hot’ fanon richie version that plagues reddie fanfics and i feel like,, i just let the other fanon version, on the other side of the spectrum, take over a little bit too much. ( you know, the fanon version that doesn’t let anyone exist outside of their ships ?? yeah, that fanon version ) the bio i wrote for him in my google docs is way more accurate for the actual idea i have in my head. i know it’s just tumblr rp but it’s a hobby i wanna fully enjoy so i want to fall in love with him again aha

with that being said i’m dropping all the threads i have on this blog, maybe switching my url back to the old one ( we will c about that tho ) and starting fresh!! :’3 if we had a thread and you want to write with me please im! ( also if we just started a thread i’m p sure i can still continue it bc it still leaves me a lot of wiggle room )

have a nice day y’all owo

[marcilled]

The Xylo ARG: a summary

Have you or someone you follow been getting cryptic asks like the one above? They always just say one of the two following things:

a303d61a3714b71b459a9e65921078 OR a303d61a-371-4b71-b45-9a9e65921078

Well, good work, you’ve managed to stumble into a new tumblr ARG which I’ve taken to calling the “Xylo ARG” or “Shiloh ARG”. I’ve already talked about this on my blog already, but I thought it might be a good idea to have a post summarizing what the hell is up with these asks and what the deal with this ARG is.

The main blog and focus of this ARG is here: @xylophonetic

If you haven’t already read my previous post about this, you should check that out. It includes some speculation and theories that I didn’t include in this post, most notably my theories about this string of characters being a UUID, as well as some observations that this hex number actually corresponds to 5 unique colors encoded in hexadecimal.

Since my previous post, there’s been some developments, but sadly I and the others I’ve been discussing this with over discord haven’t come up with any major leads, or if we have, they haven’t led anywhere yet.

That being said, I thought it might be useful to make a post summarizing some of what we already know about this. I’ve never done an ARG and don’t even really know much about them, but I was one of the people sent one of these asks so in a way I’m a small part of it now. I figured I’d make this post since I think I was the first person to really analyze what was going on here and notice that there’s an actual blog associated with these asks people have been getting. Obvs a lot of these discoveries weren’t made by me tho, I’ve not devoted much time to discovering things, there’s a few others involved in trying to figure this out too. (y’all, feel free to hop in the replies/reblogs if you want people to know you’re helping with this).

Anyways, let’s get onto the actual post. This might get lengthy, so it’ll be below the cut. Heads up- this post contains creepy imagery, depictions which might be described as “body horror”, as well as mentions of parental abuse. All posts referenced should have a link provided unless they were deleted before the creation of this post. Got it? Let’s dive in.

First off, let’s recap on how this all started, and how me and a few others came to realize that this was, indeed, an ARG we’re looking at. (Presumably, anyways- all of the happenings are too strange to just be the work of some crafty aesthetic blogger… probably.)

It all started with a couple of popular tumblr users getting asks like the one linked at the top of the post here. Just this cryptic hexadecimal string, sometimes with hyphens, sometimes without. It’s unclear how many people these anonymous asks were sent to, but if you look up the text you’ll find a couple other popular tumblr users that were sent the ask. It’s always anonymous, and I don’t know of anyone who’s received direct messages from the blog owner(s).

After pondering it a bit, I decided to look up the ask I got on tumblr, and noticed a blog which had this string of characters as its url. And that’s where things started getting interesting.

The blogs

The main blog relating to this ARG appears to be https://xylophonetic.tumblr.com/. Her URL has changed a couple times since we first discovered it, the url was originally a303d61a3714b71b459a9e65921078. From now on I’ll be referring to this blog/blog owner as “Shiloh”, as that is and has been the name stated on the blog. (Also- her pronouns are she/hers as mentioned here.)

There is also another blog relating to this story, which I hadn’t mentioned in the previous post (because at the time we did not know about it / it had not been created yet). This blog originally had the url a303d61a, but has since taken the previous URL that shiloh used: https://a303d61a3714b71b459a9e65921078.tumblr.com/

This new blog was originally titled “Safe?”, and doesn’t appear to have any name associated as far as anyone can tell, so from here on I’ll be referring to them as “safe”. It’s unclear if “safe” is a character that has been mentioned by Shiloh before, but it’s certain that they are associated with the ARG because they swapped urls with shiloh. At time of writing, the “Safe?” blog has had its title changed twice, first to a series of three emojis, then to an eye emoji. We will continue to call them “Safe” until there is a more appropriate name discovered/decided on.

There is also, technically, a third blog- this blog uses the URL previously used by Safe, and it appears that this blog may just be for keeping the url hoarded. However, there’s still some interesting things on this blog, and even some possible hints. The blog is https://a303d61a.tumblr.com/ and will go unnamed unless things begin to appear on that blog as well.

Okay, now that we know a bit about how this started, and what blogs to be on the lookout for, what is there to know? Well, if you take a look at Shiloh’s blog, you might not even realize what you’re looking at is a part of an ARG at first. From first glance, it honestly just looks like an average aesthetic blog. She reblogs lots of aesthetic type posts from various bloggers, a lot of which may not mean much in the long run, but some of the posts she reblogs do give a bit of insight on some of the different “characters” in this emerging story. However, she also sometimes posts very cryptic things- many original posts contain very strange and cryptic photos or text that’s been purposefully obfuscated or otherwise altered. The same string of text “a303d61a…” is present throughout the blog’s history. There’s also other posts from Shiloh that imply that she is (or, was) in danger, or that she was sick, that she’s afraid of certain other characters, etc.

So, these “characters”… who are they? There are quite a few distinct “characters” involved in this, some seemingly more relevant than others. I’ll give a brief overview of what we know about all of them, but first, I should say what is known about the central character here: Shiloh.

Shiloh

While we don’t know a lot about Shiloh herself, there are a few things we can say for sure. Shiloh likes to reblog things she likes or thinks are interesting, much like your run of the mill aesthetic blogger. However, she also posts her own strange, cryptic photos sometimes- often times with many filters and photo manipulation used to make them look strange or hard to decipher.

Shiloh seems prone to deleting posts often, for one reason or another- or posting things then rapidly deleting them. This has been noted to happen even late into the night without much rhyme or reason. The “Safe?” blog is sometimes used to archive some of these deleted posts, although not all of the important/noteworthy posts are actually saved in this way. Shiloh has even been shown to go back and frequently edit old posts, sometimes multiple times. Her (and the other blogs’) urls, titles, icons, blog colors and headers have been known to change at random.

She also seems to not have total control over her blog/account- she’s posted before about her url or icon changing out of her control, and seeming confused or upset by it. See here. She’s also posted before about how she’s “regaining control” and such.

As well, it seems that for a time, Shiloh fell ill with some unknown ailment. Or rather, unknown to her- “they won’t tell me”. It’s unknown who “they” is in this context, but Shiloh seemed sad that she could not see Nat any longer- and also that her mother was preventing her from going out due to this illness. Notably, after posting this, she posted “im not a monster im not”. Perhaps people, possibly her mother, were telling her her illness made her monstrous??

Yesterday evening (may 16), she posted that her fever is gone and she is doing better now. Perhaps she has recovered from her illness– although she still seems confused about what is happening.

Aside from those things, she has also posted a photo here, tagged as “#me”:

(original post)

There’s a lot of uncanny images like this on her blog, and I can’t include every one of them- but this is, supposedly, Shiloh. There’s also another post in her “#me” tag, but it is simply a reblog of some art. Not sure if it is important.

Safe?

I’ve covered most of what we currently know about Shiloh herself, but there are many other “characters” at play in this story. Most of these characters we only know about based upon things Shiloh has said about them, or posts she has tagged them in. “Safe?”, on the other hand, we only know about from their blog, and how they interact with Shiloh.

Safe is a bit of a mystery right now. It’s unclear if they(?) are even one of the characters mentioned by Shiloh or not, or if they are an outsider completely. Regardless of who they are, they seem hostile towards Shiloh.

Safe’s blog was not known until two days ago (may 15th) around ~4pm. When we discovered it, our initial thought was that the blog could be unrelated to the ARG itself, and it could potentially just be somebody who was following along and taking time out to archive the posts. Shiloh is known to delete posts sometimes after all, including ones that seem pretty important.

As time would tell though, it became clear that Safe is another actor in this story, although they seem to be even more mysterious than Shiloh.

Safe seems to reblog many of Shiloh’s original posts, sometimes adding tags or even editing the post in certain ways. We have reason to suspect that Safe is a malevolent force, as they have reblogged the photo of Shiloh and tagged the picture “#it”, in spite of her specifically requesting not to be called it. They’ve also reblogged posts from her that say “cold” and tagged it “freeze”, and a post saying “warm” with the tag “burn”, as if wishing harm on Shiloh.

Nonetheless, some of the most compelling clues we’ve gotten yet have come from the Safe blog. Particularly, it was the Safe blog which posted the following:

Sadly, the post was later deleted from both blogs, and there is no web archive of it, or fullsize versions of the right and left pictures. Here’s the fullsize of the center picture, though:

This post originally came from Shiloh’s blog, although I believe the images were not in the original post– Safe seems to have a habit of editing Shiloh’s posts and adding new things.

These pictures are tantalizing because of the caption: “room 371″. If you’ll notice, 371 is a subset of the string of text tying all of this together…

a303d61a-371-4b71-b45-9a9e65921078

The significance of this is currently unknown. However, there was some speculation that Shiloh may have been hospitalized due to her illness- these images do look somewhat like a hospital. However, this conflicts with what Shiloh herself has said- she is at home. So, what is room 371? We just don’t know, at the moment.

Another series of posts from Safe that just happened today only further the mysteries surrounding them. Today, they reblogged the post in which Shiloh said her fever was gone and edited the text to make it say “SHE MADE ME SICK”. It’s unclear who “she” is, in this context- but this seems important.

Also today, safe changed their blog title from “Safe?” to a series of three emojis- a safety pin, an old key, and a dagger. This is significant because of another thing I’ll bring up later. At time of posting, they’ve changed their blog title yet again to be just an eye emoji.

Beyond the posts about room 371, and other mysterious edits and reblogs of Shiloh’s content, not much is known for sure about Safe. There are some theories that Safe is actually Shiloh’s mother, or that they are a reflection of Shiloh’s inner thoughts and feelings about herself, but for the time being these are simply theories with not enough proof to back them up yet.

Other Characters (Nat, Melody, Zach, Brian)

Now, it is time to get into the other named characters in all of this. These other characters we only know about from things that Shiloh has said, or posts that she has reblogged and tagged in their name. For some characters, we only know of them at all due to her tags.

First, let’s start with “Nat”. Nat is one of Shiloh’s best friends, and clearly someone she cares about a lot. Shiloh was very sad when she could no longer see her after falling ill. A scroll through Shiloh’s Nat tag will show a variety of posts, although there seem to be some strong connections to love, tarot, and cats. Also, sometimes, space.

Something interesting to note is that in the tags of this post, Shiloh seemed to imply that Nat also has a blog, but “she changed urls”, and Shiloh doesn’t seem to know what her url is anymore, simply saying “weird”. While this is purely speculation, it’s possible that Nat’s blog could have been tampered with, in the same way that Shiloh’s was previously (possibly by the person who runs the Safe blog?)

After Nat, we have a minor character: Melody. It’s possible they could be more important, but right now, I can’t find any posts where Shiloh directly mentions melody- we only know of melody from various posts tagged with that name. Interestingly, one of the earliest posts on the blog (and an original post, too) depicts a pair of boots and is tagged as “#melody”. There’s a slight pattern of celestial bodies and plants, but nothing too significant to comment on here.

After Melody is another minor character: Zach. Here’s Shiloh’s #zach tag. A common theme here seems to be certain mammals (an opossum and a squirrel) and two pictures of pocket knives. Recently, Shiloh has posted that zach is a friend of hers. Other than that, not much is known of Zach.

That brings us to Brian- another interesting character. Here’s Shiloh’s #brian tag. There’s a few original posts here, with some cartoon characters dancing and hugging. There’s also the same pocket knives that zach was tagged in.

On the surface there might not seem to be a lot here about Brian, but in actuality I have reason to suspect that Brian may be Shiloh’s brother. I believe our first hint at this was this post:

It would make sense that her brother would be there at her home, albeit unexpectedly. Another post that re-affirms this hunch is this now deleted post:

the tag #brother was put alongside #brian here. Also, there is this post which also mentions there being a brother:

There may be other characters, as there are a lot of tags in use on the blog. However, these 4 are the most obvious ones, having names that are… just ordinary people names.

Mother and Father

Beyond the already named characters, there’s two more distinct characters mentioned on Shiloh’s blog- “Mother” as well as “Father”. There are very few posts about Father, but a great deal about Mother. I’ll just preface this right now by saying that Shiloh’s mother seems abusive and openly hostile/aggressive towards Shiloh. As for her father, not much is known of him, but he seems to be absent from Shiloh’s life, likely due to having divorced her mother at some point in the past.

If you take a quick scroll through her #mother tag, you can see that there is a strong association with birds. This seems like a very consistent thing- perhaps Shiloh’s mother is a bird. Or maybe she just connects her with birds for some reason. Either way, if there’s bird imagery, there’s a good chance that it relates to Shiloh’s mother (although there was one bird image tagged as #brian, too).

Some of the earliest posts on the blog make references to mother in this way, too:

Another motif in the photos tagged as #mother are glowing eyes:

As discussed before, Shiloh’s mother seems abusive. Here’s some posts showing Shiloh expressing fear of her mother:

As well as some recent posts from earlier today (may 17) which tell a lot about how Shiloh feels about her mother:

(source for the last one)

It has been stated that Mother doesn’t like any of Shiloh’s friends:

It’s also been shown that Shiloh’s mother tells her she can’t go out and can’t see nat anymore due to her illness. I also speculated earlier that her mother may have been the one to call her a “monster”.

Additionally, this cryptic original post is in the #mother tag:

full tags are #fear, #heart, #love, #mother, #love love.

There’s a lot of hidden text in this image, including the mysterious hex string, as well as phrases and words such as “fear of the heart of love”, “like anything”, etc. It is a bit hard to make out, and difficult to reverse all the filters done to make the text illegible to begin with.

Adding to the series of mysteries surrounding Mother, earlier today Shiloh posted a series of pictures that appear to depict a path to a river. When asked about them, Shiloh stated that “mom doesnt like the river”, and that “she thinks its dirty or something”. Curiously, she says that her mom is scared of fish.

There have also been some theories that Mother is the one running Safe’s blog, antagonizing Shiloh when she gets the chance. There’s credence given to this theory by taking into account this post, where Shiloh talks about having her blog changed without her control over it. In the post, you can see that her icon was changed to this image:

An edited version of the full photo remains on Safe’s blog. This is a photo that was created by a neural network (source), and contains many bird-like features, so we’ve taken to calling this picture “mother bird”. The fact that Shiloh’s icon was changed to this while the blog was not under her control seems to imply that her mother was the one messing with her blog. Considering how much urls swapped between Safe and Shiloh, it seems as though there’s a link between Mother and Safe, although, again, this is speculation.

There is also this post on Safe’s blog, which depicts feathers / knives side by side, along with a caption from Shiloh saying “she’s coming”:

The post is now deleted from Shiloh’s blog. Given the feathers/bird motif here, and referring to a hostile entity as “she”, it’s probably safe to assume that Shiloh was referring to Mother.

At the very least, we can say that both Mother and Safe are openly hostile/antagonistic towards Shiloh, if not the same person.

As for “father”, there’s only a few posts referring to a father, and only recently have there been any original posts. Shiloh seems to associate him with suited businessmen, and there are many posts implying that her parents had a very testy relationship. It seems as though they divorced, and now Shiloh’s father is no longer in her life. Aside from some possible resentment possibly stemming from him not being there any longer, it’s hard to say much about Father, other than that he’s not around any longer.

Other tags

There are many tags in use on Shiloh’s blog, many of them seemingly mundane, something you’d expect from any run of the mill aesthetic blog. Still, there are a few tags which incite some intrigue, or are worth speculating about.

One such tag is #home. Shiloh makes many references to “home”- never “my house” or “where i live” or any other word- only ever referring to it as simply “home”. The images in the tag are often very lush and green depictions of nature- they could just be pictures of landscapes, or sometimes they are pictures of humble cottages in the wilderness. Sometimes they can depict houses that are rotting and decaying. All these pictures seem to signify what “home” is to Shiloh, and I think that “home” is a specific location.

To back up this theory, there’s also the tag #camp. There’s not a lot in this tag, but it seems to evoke this feeling of some summer camp or something that Shiloh went to once perhaps. Maybe “camp” could come up again in later posts? I guess we’ll see.

There’s also the tag #you, which would seem to be the opposite of the #me tag. However, there’s just some songs and other various reblogs in this tag.

Misc. observations / speculation

The new(?) blog at the url https://a303d61a.tumblr.com/ may be otherwise empty, but the blog’s title and description are somewhat curious. As of time of writing, this is the entire contents of their blog:

My device doesn’t have a new enough version of unicode to support displaying some of these emojis, but the emojis in the title are:

safety pin 🧷 old key 🗝 dagger 🗡

The emojis included in the blog’s description are:

rainbow 🌈 tooth 🦷 scissors ✂️ wilted flower 🥀

Also worth noting, is that these three emojis were briefly displayed as the title of Safe’s blog earlier today.

I get the feeling that these emojis may be a pretty significant hint. Something that reinforces this suspicion in me is the fact that Safe made a post tagging Shiloh’s blog, similar to how this new blog made a post tagging Safe. However, the post Safe made includes a safety pin emoji, which is one of the three emojis included in this blog’s title.

This is purely speculation, so feel free not to believe me, or reinterpret it how you wish of course, but: Perhaps Shiloh’s blog is like a safety pin, holding the story as we know it together. But, what we really need to find is the key. The key will lead us further, until we find the dagger.

I also find the emojis used in the description curious, because Shiloh has posted pictures of scissors (actually, lawn clippers?) before. Additionally, Safe has made a post about teeth and eyes hurting before. Interestingly, this post was edited from the original– Shiloh’s post was about her mother seeming angry, but Safe changed it to say “teeth hurt eyes hurt”.

Another potential lead that @ skippsblipps discovered, was a pattern in this old post from Shiloh.

Aside from the obvious secret message mixed in amongst the text, there seems to be a pattern of when the “a303d…” string of text repeats, and when there is something other than the original “a303d…” string. In their words:

“if we count only where the code was exactly the original code, its 6 , 1 , 2 , 1 , 4 , 2 if we count where the code deviates, its 1 , 3 , 3 , 3 , 1″

There’s a chance that this post could be absolutely random nonsense, or that we were only meant to look for the words within the text, but perhaps there’s something more here.

Closing thoughts

I said it at the start, and I’ll say it again: I don’t know a damn thing about ARGs. And, hell, after spending hours compiling stuff for this post, I’m still pretty clueless about where this one might lead. My main hope with this post was to inform anyone who’s curious about this ARG about what we’ve discovered so far, as well as to fill people in who may have missed stuff.

Also, I’d like to apologize if this post jumps topics around a lot, or if it can be a bit hard to follow. Honestly I think that’s just a result of all of the different loose ends in this ARG being hard to follow themselves, although I tried my best. I had to keep updating this post as I typed it, because new posts kept coming in and new discoveries/speculation kept happening. So, sorry for any confusion.

Sadly, many posts on both blogs end up getting deleted, and never archived. That’s why I’ve taken the liberty to archive each and every single post and tag I linked to in this breakdown on the internet archive, which is also why this took hours to make this post because I had to ctrl+c and ctrl+v like a million times. If you notice any of the links I put in this post are broken, just paste the url into the wayback machine and you should at least pull up the archive that I took at the time of typing this post. I couldn’t archive every single thing on all these blogs, just the stuff that I thought was relevant.

If anyone else is inspired to hop in on this ARG because of this post, please feel free to add your thoughts/speculation in the replies, reblogs, whatever. Also please don’t expect me to answer all your asks & speculation, I did this post because it seems like nobody else is paying attention to this and I thought it was cool and deserved some time and attention. I fully expect people smarter than me to outpace me and discover all the secrets and that’s cool with me, I’m just along for the ride. I hope my post helped. Thanks for reading!

EDIT: I’ve made an update to this post here, go read it!

[gobbochune]

I’m calling you out for not knowing how to call people out

I saw a callout post for a problematic user the other day that was probably the worst attempt defamation I’ve ever seen. And this made me mad not because I thought the target was wrongly accused, but because there were like seven people giving their testimony to the abuse and yet it was handled so poorly that I doubt anyone who saw it would even believe them. This is pretty dangerous considering the person in question was an actual pedophile grooming children for sex, and a quick google search told me that this person has an army of stans ripping the lack of significant evidence apart in order to entrap new victims. Calling out the blatant inconsistencies in testimonies is a tactic that abusers use to separate their victims from the people who want to help them. Anyone who has had a run-in with a serial pedophile can tell you that they usually have a methods to make people trust them over numerous allegations. Its not enough to throw a rock at their house, at its worst, that rock can even help the abuser gain a victim’s sympathy. 

So I’d like to take this moment to explain how to properly spread information about a potentially dangerous person. Though, I’d like to make this very clear: I’m not saying this as someone whose done a lot of these as if its some kind of art form. I’m doing this from the perspective of someone who has seen the scum of the earth and know how they ensnare people, and hope to be able to spread awareness to potential victims. 

1. The Abuser

I feel like it is a no brainer to actually mention who the abuser is, but apparently thats difficult for some people to wrap their heads around. So often I will see purposeful misspellings or code names in callout posts to avoid causing drama. This is stupid for two reasons: Firstly, if it is at the point where you feel a callout post needs to be made for people’s safety, fandom drama should no longer be an issue. Secondly, if you don’t make it clear who it is you’re warning people about, how the fuck are they actually supposed to avoid them? Like, do you expect a 12 year old who is currently being gaslit by a pedophile to message you like ‘Hey, is @lle/////gory!!!334 Gregory? That kinda looked like his username but I couldn’t tell.’ Of course they’re not. They’re going to ask the person who is grooming them, who will either say ‘lol nah’ or make up a sob story as to why they’re being defamed. Grow a pair and use their names. 

It is very likely that the abuser will have more then one account, you’ll probably need to list all of them that you’re aware of, but know that the minute they see a post with their current name on it they’re probably going to change it. So, mention very clearly who they are, what circles they can be found in, and how they amassed enough popularity to trap victims in the first place. 

This callout post that I saw, which I will now be using as a reference for what not to do, managed to list the abuser’s various names but pretty much nothing else about them. All it said was that they were apparently the origin of some meme, but didn’t even explicitly say what the meme was so I had no idea if I even knew this person or not. I didn’t know if they were a fandom blog, an art blog, a social justice blog, a youtuber, the only context I could draw was from the fandom-specific usernames of their victims. If they changed their name, which they probably did right away, I would have no way of telling who this person was. 

Include screenshots of any of their posts with a lot of notes and listing this as identification for who they are. Also explicitly mention what circles they can be found in, any projects they were involved with, and any other iconography that can be associated with them. However, there is something I’d like to stress:

Do not include leaked personal information such as home address, workplace, or emails. It is not your authority to broadcast this information online. A callout post is not a legal testimony, merely a warning to other internet users within a community. If alerting the authorities is necessary, it is a different process to be handled by the victims and their supporters. Do not attempt to intervene through a social media. 

If you don’t want to receive hate from an army of stans thats understandable, which is why many people often will make a blog where victims can anonymously offer evidence. In fact, I suggest doing this as a first resort as it is easier to search “_____ problematic” into Tumblr then it is to scour a personal blog for mention of the abuser. This will also provide a handy archive for the allegations, and help keep up with the abuser’s activity. However, for legitimacy’s sake, I suggest that the mod’s identities of these blogs be clear. This leads us to my next point:

2. The Evidence

This is actually my primary reason for wanting to make this. The stuff mentioned above delegitimises accusations but isn’t really dangerous the same way a shoddy presentation of evidence can be. Someone who has been thoroughly brainwashed by the abuse cycle will look for any reason to continue a relationship with their abuser. They’ve likely been isolated from their friends, groomed to worship or fear their abuser, and are so drained from a volatile relationship that they don’t have the mental energy to waste on doubt. It takes a lot of strength to end even a good relationship, thats why abusers try to keep their victims drained and confused. They make them think it is easier to continue being abused then try to untangle the lies and manipulation. 

That is why you need to be explicit, blunt, and vocal about what the abuser has done. Put the most serious and unforgivable accusations at near top of your post in clear view. Try not to rely too heavily on accusations that dont have concrete evidence, as the abuser has probably already explained away anything you don’t have in writing. 

I am going to once again revisit the terrible callout post from before. The first thing they did was the usual attention grabbing intro with the paragraph pretending to tell us who this person is was to list a bunch of testimonies from various users.

Now, testimonies don’t really work over tumblr in a traditional sense. In a courtroom a testimony is given under oath, all the words spoken must be presumed to be true because the speaker understands that lying is a federal offence. Obviously the internet is not like this, and there is nothing stopping someone with a blog from lying. Not to mention, if they had been in the abuser’s circle in the past but is now flinging accusations, it is safe to say they didn’t leave on the best of terms. Abusers are famously unable to take responsibility for their relationships falling apart, odds are everyone in the abuser’s circle convinces their latest victim that all previous victims were in the wrong. 

I spoke with a friend who briefly joined the public discord of a known abuser to see what it was like, and showed me the rules specifically prohibiting anyone on the server to discuss allegations towards the mods. There was even a list of names that the bot would automatically block if you tried to type them in the chat log, and the mods had this witch hunt mentality where if they found evidence of you conversing with blacklisted users outside the discord, you would be banned and your name would be added to the list. It is very likely that the act of reading a testimony and asking about it could place a victim in danger. 

However, there is value to a testimony online if there are more then one. Testimonies are really only effective if there are an abundance of them, so many that you don’t even have to read one, the sheer volume of people speaking out against the abuser is suspicious enough on its own. Again, the presence of a blog that allows anonymous asks or submissions would be the ideal platform to publish testimonies.

Back at the terrible callout post, underneath the list of testimonies they had some bullet points of direct evidence that they linked directly back to the abusers blog. You should not do this. I cannot believe there are people who do not realise it is largely worthless to use posts that the abuser still has access to as a source. 

If you have even a remotely functional following anywhere on the internet you have probably said something stupid that bit you in the ass before. Your immediate reaction was probably to defend yourself, and when that failed, you go back and delete the post. Abusers can do the same thing, or, even more insidious, edit the post to say something else. 

“_____ fetishises black women! here is the link!” can originally have linked to something explicit but can easily be changed to “I think black women are beautiful and deserve our support <3 <3″ to make the writer of the callout post look stupid or overzealous. 

Screenshots are your friends. Take screenshots of the concerning behaviour and either include them in the post or link to a photo sharing archive. There’s really not much to explain about this. I cannot believe someone thought linking back to the original url would work. 

Another thing I cannot believe about that terrible callout post was that half of the accusations linked to posts of people repeating rumours they’ve heard. 

This is...dumb. This is unsalvageable. Don’t to this. It will never count and you will look like an idiot. 

However that terrible awful worthless callout post did have SOME credible evidence, to shit that didn’t matter at all, which leads us to our last point. 

3. The Abuse

Now this part is hard to discuss as most people seem to think abuse is a subjective term. This is not the case. 

While abuse can take shape in an infinite number of ways, not all stuff that pisses you off counts as abuse. Sometimes a jerk is just a jerk. Now you can hate a jerk as much as you want- they probably deserve it, but don’t try to sell someone just being a generally awful person as abuse.  

The terrible awful no good callout post tried to back up claims of criminal activity by saying the abuser cares more about Doctor Who than Flint Michigan. 

This is not abuse. Why would anyone think this is abuse. 

Now, if I have a blog devoted to a fandom I’m probably not going to post stuff about Flint Michigan to that blog. As stated above, I had no idea who this person was. For all I know they could have been exclusively a fanblog for Doctor Who. Sometimes there are just spaces that are kept away from serious real world issues and that in itself is not a crime. 

Trying to equate something like that to an act of sexual assault only makes it easier to dismiss your legitimate concerns by saying: ‘they’re just hating on me for being cringy’

There are millions of reasons why someone might not want to keep up with real world social activism on their blog, and those are a million reasons the abuser will use to invalidate your legitimacy. 

But hey, if that sort of thing annoys you, I totally get that. Go ahead and block this person, campaign against them, blacklist their stuff, encourage your friends to do the same. I’ve blocked people for less, just dont call it abuse. 

Now there is actual fan content that is means for legitimate concern. If the person consistently praises or creates content of abusive scenarios, its a red flag. If a person consistently defends incest or pedophilia, its a red flag. If a person bullies someone else for being ‘triggered’ over Flint Michigan, its a red fucking flag. 

The problem isn’t the art or the content or the blog type, but the mentality behind those things. Liking Doctor who isnt a problem. Liking the idea of Doctor Who having sex with his own daughter is. Avoiding current events isnt a problem. Trying to bully activists into silence is. You need to include that context to be taken seriously. 

Chat logs are your friend. Get the permission of victims to post, anonymously or otherwise, chatlogs of concerning behaviour. Try to focus on patterns to show a potential victim that the tactics used to insnare them have been used on other people before. Highlight instances of an abuser being sweet, (The Honeymoon Phase) as well as how quickly they devolve into abuse. 

In Conclusion

I’ve probably turned a lot of people off with this big dumb rant about something as petty as a callout post, and to those people I say: Good. If you’ve never been in a position to need this kind of thing then that is good. I’m not being facetious here, or implying you don’t know what you’re talking about just because you disagree with me, a callout post is really a last ditch effort to warn others that someone can construct in the aftermath of their ordeal. Pretty much everything I’ve mentioned relies on the willingness for victims to come forward, which I totally understand if they dont want to.

It is not my intention to bully others into sharing traumatic memories over the internet, but rather to make sure that anyone who does speak out wont become a target for harassment. At the end of the day, these are just posts floating around on tumblr. All you can ever hope is for someone to see your warning and stay away from the person who hurt you. Perhaps even draw the attention of other victims and help them process what has happened to them. 

But baseless claims and petty squabbles aren’t how you do that. Abuse should be taken seriously, and there is a large difference between someone Problematic and an actual Abuser. 

[xaydungtruonggia]

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!

[camerasieunhovn]

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!

[ductrungnguyen87]

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!

[gamebazu]

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

[kjt-lawyers]

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!

[noithatotoaz]

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!

[thanhtuandoan89]

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!

[drummcarpentry]

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!

[lakelandseo]

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!

[epackingvietnam]

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

[bfxenon]

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!