This is not the link building article you — or really anyone — were probably hoping for. It isn't a step-by-step guide to getting the best backlinks, it isn't some list of hot tips or new opportunities, and it isn't the announcement of some great tool. What it is, unashamedly, is a window into the brutal slog that is outreach-based link building. 

What can you expect?

1. YELLING IN CAPSLOCK.

2. Some tips and tricks.

3. Weeping and gnashing of teeth



All kidding aside, one of the few aphorisms I’ve come to believe is that sharing how we do things as SEOs is almost never a problem, because 99% of people don't have the follow-through and resources to make it happen. I would love to be proven wrong by the readers on Moz.

My goal here is to give a realistic understanding of the monotonous slog that is white-hat, outreach-based link building. I happen to think that link building is a perfect counterexample to the "Pareto Principle". Unlike the Pareto Principle, which states that 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the cause, I find that unless you put in 60-80% of the effort, you won't see more than 20% of the potential effect. The payoff comes when you have outworked your competitors, and I promise you they are putting in more than 20%.

The goal of this "Webslog" is to document the weeks and months that go into a link building campaign, at least as far as how I go about the process.

Also, look at that gorgeous fountain pen. I frickin' love fountain pens.

I will try and update this document every week or so with progress reports, my motivation level, the tips and tricks I’ve employed over the last few days, the headaches, wins, and losses. By the end of this, I hope to have accomplished something along the lines of a link building journal. It won’t be a blueprint for link building success, but hopefully it will mark on the map of your link building journey the things to avoid, the best way to get through certain jams, and when you’re just going to have to tough it out.

Journal Entry Four: The Responses

One of the things I love telling people about a good outreach campaign is that your responses will actually be pleasant. Let me show you a subsection list of the responses I’ve received in the last few days:

Hi Russ,

Thank you for sharing this with us, we really appreciate it. I am going to send this information about the broken link to our content team so they can have it fixed.

Thanks again and have a great rest of your week!

Hi Russ,

Thanks for letting us know about that PDF no longer working. We will review this with our team and get it updated asap. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Just let us know if we can help with anything else!

Best,

Thank you. Will try to do tomorrow.

Of course, every now and then you will get an angry message... wait, nope. I haven't received one yet after sending out my first 100 emails. If you are genuinely polite, don't lie about "oh, I loved your article so much blah blah", and just offer a quick solution for them, at worst people are just going to disregard the email. On a few rare occasions, someone will be upset, and your best response is to just say "Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope you have a wonderful day!" and move on.

I will say this, though. I mentioned using GrassHopper for a phone number before. I used my real name, a real email address associated with the domain to which I am building links, and a script in which I make it clear that I have a site that has the relevant content. When the person on the receiving end of the email sees that you are a real person, they are far less likely to treat you poorly. Perhaps they might still ignore you, but they won't be nasty. 

Status update

So where are we with links? I’ve sent 100 emails either directly or through contact forms and have earned four links. The best link is a DA 92, PA 53 while the worst link is a DA 39, PA 32. That is a 4% return rate so far. I'm pretty stoked about that, but I'm going to keep pushing for higher performance.

Journal Entry Three: Build That List

Alright, it’s time to build that list of contacts for outreach. If you recall, the strategy I’m employing is a variant of broken link building. This means that my targets are all the sites that link to the broken URL.

So, my first step is simply going to be getting every single potential link I can find. Despite my allegiance to Moz, I have always been clear that sometimes you need all of the tools. In order to make the most out of this whole process, you need to get the backlink data from every provider.

Yes, this can be expensive, but think about how much you would have to pay for a link, and then think about how much one month of service costs from these SaaS tools. In most cases, just getting one or two links from the export they provide makes it worthwhile. Here are the providers I draw from:

1. Moz
2. Majestic
3. Ahrefs
4. SEMRush
5. OpenLinkProfiler
6. WebMeUp

There are a few private data sources I use as well, but these are pretty comprehensive.

The next step is deduping and cleaning the list. These are the steps I follow:

1. Check all URLs to determine if the link is live. The reason I do this step first is because it’s possible that one index has an old page that no longer has the link, while another index has the current location. If you remove duplicates before checking to see if the link is live, there’s a possibility that you’ll remove the live link, leaving the dead one, which you would ultimately remove. Another bonus of doing this first is to look for canonical tags so you can find the canonical version.
2. Now I remove links from the same domain. There are a number of exclusions that I have to be careful about, like Medium.com where an author could be completely different from page to page, even though they are on the same subdomain. As part of this process, I check the metrics for the page to determine which of the links to keep. I use a simple heuristic based on referring domains, URL length, no query string, and no hash, if possible. Now, for those of you who don't care about ordering your links because you plan on contacting every one of them, you can just dedupe based on hosts. Here is a free tool to do just that.

Okay, so now I have a giant list of URLs and I have to find contact information. There are a number of ways in which I go about collecting email addresses and contact pages, and the prioritization is based mostly on the cost.

First pass: desktop software

I know it isn't in vogue these days, but I still use a good old fashioned email scraper first. I happen to use Atomic Email Extractor, but there are tons of others out there including Cute Web Email Extractor and Email Extractor Pro. I like to start with these tools as there is zero incremental cost based on usage. Once you buy a license, you can look up contacts without worrying about per-row limits.

Second pass: database services

There are several strong database services now like Hunter and Snov.io. While they are excellent sources and can get you a lot of coverage, you can run into some problems with companies that have tons of employees. Many of these databases are built based on indexes of the web (like CommonCrawl) which means you might find emails from forums, mail lists, and other locations rather than the website you target. This can cause difficulties because you don't know which of the hundreds of emails is appropriate for outreach. That being said, these tools are still invaluable because they just have so much coverage.

Third pass: prospecting software

Tools like BuzzStream, Link Prospector, and Ninja Outreach are becoming more commonplace, but it can be expensive to use them for contact finding unless you intend to use them for other parts of your project. I have personally found most of these tools to be too inflexible for my needs, but I also really like to roll-my-own — so to speak. Many of the best link building firms use tools like these.

Fourth pass: brute force

The last method is somewhat controversial, so if you have any concerns, don't do it. What is often called "deep inbox verification" is a method to determine whether or not a certain email account actually exists on a site. Not all sites have this feature enabled.

There are many services which offer this type of email verification, and the least expensive provider I have found is My-Addr. The steps are simple. Imagine the site is "mytargetsite.com". First, test a nonsensical email like "[email protected]". If it returns valid, it means the site has a catch-all email and you can abandon this methodology, since everything will look valid. If it returns "not-valid", you then try the most common prefixes (info@, mail@, contact@, webmaster@). There’s a good chance that one of these will return as valid, and now you have a contact for the site.

Contact finding is a multi-day process. I often start contact finding using these automated tools, but begin outreach before they’re all completed. For this particular project, I’ve done just that.

By the next update, we should have some links!

Journal Entry Two: The Distractions Begin

It took less than 24 hours after writing the first blog post for me to see that the December core update was about to wreak havoc on my site.

As a fairly new site with highly encyclopedic content, I expected the keyword selection I’d targeted to be a tough sell until I built up some significant link equity and authority.



Over the course of a few days, I watched my traffic take a 75% hit. I'll admit, it was a pretty gut wrenching loss. I was so excited for this project (as it was in line with my MozCon talk Esse Quam Videri). I had the resources to make something great and the momentum to boot. But if there is one lesson I have learned in SEO over the last 15+ years, it is that if you know what you are doing is right, don't stop because of an update. Keep. Moving. Forward.

So, things are full steam ahead. The process of building a contact list has begun with the mix of several key tools which I will talk about in my next post. Until then, don't let the man get you down. You got this.

Journal Entry One: Day One

Day one is almost always the best day. It’s a preparation day. It's the day you buy the gym membership, purchase a veritable ton of whey protein and protein shaker bottles, weigh yourself — in all reality you accomplish nothing, but feel like you have done so much. Day one is important because it can provide momentum and clear a path to success, but it also presents the problem of motivation being incredibly disproportionate to success. It's likely that your first day will be the most discordant with respect to motivation and results. 

Rand does a great job explaining the relationship between ROI and Effort:

However, I think the third component here is motivation. While it does largely track the chart Rand provides, I think there are some notable differences, the first of which is that, in the first few days, your motivation will be high despite not having any results. Your motivation will probably dip very quickly and become parallel with the remainder of the "effort" line on the graph, but you get the point.



It's essential to keep your motivation up over the course of the "slog", and the trick is to disconnect your motivation from your ROI and attach it instead to attainable goals which lead to ROI. It's a terribly difficult thing to do. 

Alright, so, Day One prep.

Project description

For this project, I'll be employing a unique form of broken link building (Part 2). If you've seen any of my link building presentations in the last 2-3 years, you may have caught a glimpse of some of the techniques in the process. Nevertheless, the link building method really isn't important for the sake of this project. All that matters for the sake of our discussion in the method is:

1. Outreach Based (requires contacting other webmasters).
2. Neutral with regard to Black/White hat (it could be done either way).
3. Requires Prospecting.
4. Ultimately brings Return on Investment through either advertising or an exit.

In addition, I won't be using any aliases in this project. For once, I'm building something respectable enough that I don't mind my name being associated with it. I do still need to be careful (avoid negative SEO, for example) as this is a YMYL industry (health related). The site is already in existence, but with almost no links.

So, what are the returns on investment (or effort) that I'll be tracking and, importantly, won't be tracking?

1. Emails sent to links placed relative to:

• Subject line
• Pitch email
• Target broken link

2. Contact forms filled to links placed:

• Subject line
• Pitch email
• Target broken link

3. Anchor text used in links placed

4. Not tracking:

• Deliverability
• Open rate
• Reply rate
• Domain Authority of source

I know #4 will sound like a cardinal sin to many of the professional link builders reading this, but I'm really just not interested in bothering a recipient who chooses to overlook the email. I'm certain that the speed of emails sent will not impact deliverability, so the other statistics just seem like continuing to ring the doorbell at someone's house until they are forced to answer. Sure, it might work, but it also might get you reported.

Preparation

There are a couple of steps I take every time I begin a project like this.

1. Set up email, obviously. I typically set up russ@, info@, contact@, media@ and a catch all. I don't use Google. It just seems, well, wrong. I have had success with Zoho before, although honestly I just need the email so I often go with a CPANEL host and then add the MX records to Cloudflare.

2. Set up a phone number for voice mail. I like Grasshopper, personally. This is not to improve rankings (although I do put it on the site), it's to improve conversion rates. Email messages with a real phone number and real email address from a real person, with the same domain promoted as the domain in the email, just seem to do better when your project is truly above-board.

3. Set up SPF and DKIM records for better deliverability.

4. Set up a number of Google Docs sheets which will help with some of the prospecting and mail sending.

5. Set up my emailer. I know this is vague, but one of the things I try to do is create stumbling blocks to cheating. There are some awesome tools out there Pitchbox, BuzzStream, LinkProspector and more, but I find each very tempting to take shortcuts. I want to make sure I pull the trigger personally on every email that goes out. Efficient, no. Effective, not really. Safe, yeah.

Honestly, this is about as much as I can do in one day. I look forward to updating this regularly, make sure you follow @moz or @rjonesx on Twitter to get notified when we update this journal.