What are outreach links and how to get them

The site needs external links on third-party resources. According to Google Help, they can partly affect the ranking of your resource: "With the help of link-based analysis, you can find out with high accuracy whether the site is really useful and interesting for users." There are different ways to get backlinks. I propose to talk about the outreach method.

But first, a few words about the method itself.

Content:

• Specificity of outreach promotion
• Collection of key queries for search sites in the search engine results
• Search for promising sites
• Relevance and quality of donor sites. Main criteria
• Contact search
• Formation of a letter to the webmaster
• Selection of relevant sites by price and metrics
• Writing an article taking into account the requirements of the sites
• Placing an article on a donor site
• Analysis of link placement results
• Remember

Specificity of outreach promotion

Outreach links are external links on a donor site. To get them, you need to establish contacts and negotiate with administrators or owners of resources that you think are suitable.

The method is considered relatively safe. It allows you to select high-quality non-spam sites and control the entire process. Although Google does not approve link exchange schemes, outreach links look natural, even though in most cases they are purchased.

This “naturalness” is due to some features of outreach promotion:

• links are placed on thematic resources in unique thematic publications that may be useful to visitors to the donor site;
• you can not only improve the position of the pages of your site, but also get additional traffic to them due to clicks on links from donor sites, as well as a PR effect;
• there is a high probability that the sites found are not engaged in the systematic sale of links, but place them selectively and only of high quality. This can be understood by the outgoing link profile and the ratio of outgoing and incoming links (I’ll tell you in more detail later), which means that the value of the placement increases, and the risk of falling under sanctions due to links on such sites, on the contrary, is lower;
• more chances, if necessary, to make changes to the posted materials or links to them, since there is direct contact with the administrator or owner of the site;
• There can be many donor sites that match the parameters, but not every site will agree to place a link on the conditions that are optimal for you. So getting outreach links requires more work and time;
• placement prices are higher compared to, for example, platforms on stock exchanges.

Stages of outreach promotion

1. Collection of key queries to search for sites in the search engine results.
2. Collection of sites from the search results for the collected requests and / or search for sites through the analysis of the link profile of competitors - where they place their links.
3. Determining the relevance and quality of the collected resources.
4. Collection of email addresses of site representatives.
5. A letter with a request for the cost and conditions for placing links.
6. Selection of relevant sites by price and metrics.
7. Preparation of content taking into account the requirements of the sites.
8. Placement and verification of material and links.
9. Analysis of the results of placing a link.

I propose to consider this whole path on the example of the site of an investment company in the region of Kazakhstan.

The topic relates to YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) sites that could potentially affect the well-being, health, financial stability or safety of the user. Google has strict requirements for them, so special attention is needed when optimizing in general and selecting donors for placing links in particular: it is important to select only high-quality and authoritative sites.

Another difficulty was that some resources may refuse to post financial content or ask for a price several times higher. And there are not so many relevant sites in the region of Kazakhstan.

Collection of key queries for search sites in the search engine results

First of all, I made a list of keywords for finding sites. I did not take into account commercial requests, since the search results for them show the sites of competitors, and not sites with informational articles, media or thematic news portals.

First you need to select marker queries that most accurately describe the site. Then collect other keywords from them. For this you can use Google Keyword Planner (if the Google Ads account is paid) or the Serpstat tool.

Collected requests must be cleaned of irrelevant and requests without frequency.

The frequency is indicated only to determine the importance of the request, we will not need it when parsing.

Here is a list of requests for which it was worth collecting sites.

Search for promising sites

Collection of sites from the issuance of the collected requests

You can use the PS Parser tool in Netpeak Checker to find platforms based on collected requests.

1. In the "Requests" field, enter the collected semantics. You can also use search operators and use the Prefix field to apply the same operator to each query.

The following search operators are suitable for site selection:

• allinanchor - will find pages that contain all the specified keywords in the link anchor;
• allintitle - will find pages that contain all the specified keywords in the title;
• allintext - finds pages that contain all the specified keywords in the text;
• inurl - will find pages that contain the specified keyword in the URL, but for this, phrases in Cyrillic should be transliterated. For searching in the regions of the CIS, this operator can be completely replaced by the allintitle operator.

2. In the settings, I chose the Google search engine, the maximum possible number of results and all the proposed types of results (special SERP elements, advanced and paid results), as I assumed that there may be few relevant sites in the Kazakhstan region.

In the advanced settings, I chose the geolocation for the Google search engine in Kazakhstan, the Russian language, and also checked the collection of hidden results in order to get more data from the search, if available.

3. After collecting the data, I received a list of pages from the Google search results, grouped by queries.

4. Next, you need to click on the "Move hosts" button to get a list of unique domains in the main table of the tool. Their relevance and quality are then determined by a number of indicators.

You can also collect pages from the search engine results for queries using Serpstat. The "Top by Phrase" report shows the top 100 Google search and advertising results for the searched keyword.

Search for sites through the analysis of the link profile of competitors

Another option for finding a donor site is to analyze the referring domains of competitors.

In Serpstat, this can be done using the "Referring Domains" report.

In Ahrefs, in the Donor Domains report.

Relevance and quality of donor sites. Main criteria

Google says thatthat "ranking is more influenced by the quality of links and to a lesser extent by their number." The difficulty is that there is no one criterion that would determine the quality of the site. Indicators should be considered comprehensively. The higher they are, the better, of course, but the price will certainly be high at the same time. And one ideal site for the entire available budget is unlikely to have an effect. The task is to find donor sites that are optimal in terms of price-quality ratio.

The criteria below are described not in order of importance, but in terms of the convenience of the check order. For example, it would be more rational to manually check the topics and content of potential donors, before that, removing sites with low numerical indicators collected automatically.

When analyzing numerical data, their absolute accuracy is not important. The main thing is to take data according to one criterion from one source for all sites so that the error is the same and does not affect the results.

The main tools for batch collection of metrics are Netpeak Checker and Serpstat.

Region

When selecting donor sites, you should focus on sites from the same region where your target audience is located:

• with the corresponding country code top-level domain(s);
• with top-level domains (.com, .net) that receive most of their traffic from the same country(ies) as the site for which donors are selected.

In the case of donors for an investment company in Kazakhstan, she left sites with the .kz domain and top-level domains, the main traffic to which comes from Kazakhstan.

For a list of URLs, the region can be checked in Netpeak Checker by selecting the Primary Country option in the Site Traffic section.

You can manually check the main region, for example, using the SimilarWeb extension.

And if it does not provide data, through the SimilarTech Prospecting extension, in which SimilarWeb is the data source.

The next step is to remove domains with an inappropriate region from the list and check other metrics.

Site traffic

The amount of total traffic to a site gives an idea of its popularity. In addition, if the traffic is low, the likelihood of clicking on our link is reduced, as well as the opportunity to receive additional traffic.

For a list of sites, monthly traffic data can be obtained using Netpeak Checker. In the parameters, select the item "Transitions" and start collecting data. The results will look like this.

Another way to check the total traffic for a list of sites is the Batch Domain Analysis report in Serpstat. Enter a list of domains, check the "Traffic" item and the desired region (Kazakhstan).

You can manually check the total site traffic per month using the SimilarWeb extension.

SimilarWeb may not provide data for sites with little traffic. In this case, the SimilarTech Prospecting extension will again help, the data source in which is SimilarWeb.

Traffic Source Ratio

It is also worth paying attention to traffic sources, namely the share of search (organic) and direct traffic. Organic traffic gives an idea of the “relationship” of search engines to the site, while direct traffic gives an idea of the authority among users, their interest and loyalty.

When selecting sites according to this criterion, I was guided by the fact that the share of search and direct traffic was more than 50% of the total.

You can get data on the share of traffic using Netpeak Checker: in the parameters, select the items "Share of direct traffic" and "Share of search traffic" and start collecting data.

Manual information about the ratio of site traffic sources can be viewed through the SimilarWeb browser extension.

Or through the SimilarTech Prospecting extension, if SimilarWeb data is not available for display in the free version.

Domain Rank (DR)

DR is a metric from Ahrefs that shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to other sites in the Ahrefs database on a 100-point scale. How Ahrefs himself points out, "domain rank does not take into account any other variables, such as link spam, traffic, domain age, etc." That is, high DR means high "link popularity" of the site and high link opportunities. At the same time, among the backlinks of a site with a high DR, there may be links that Google does not take into account, but which take into account the domain rating.

Since DR can be artificially increased, when choosing potential donors, you should not focus on the absolute value of the metric for a particular site, but compare it with other similar sites. And also analyze backlinks.

For a list of DR sites, contact Ahrefs directly. You must select Batch Analysis, enter up to 200 domains at a time, and upload the results.

You can get ranking data for one specific domain.

Ahrefs also provides a free Website "Authority" Checker to check DR.

Next, you need to remove sites with low DR from the list. Among the received data, the domain rating ranged from 2 to 84. I left sites with a DR of at least 25. In the future, during the analysis, you can raise the lower bar if necessary.

The ratio of the number of incoming and outgoing links

Potential donor sites should have more inbound links than outbound ones. This means that the resource, if it sells links on a regular basis, does it selectively, and placement on it will not cause search engine filters.

You can check the number of incoming and outgoing links of sites in Serpstat using the "Link Analysis" report.

After collecting numerical indicators and already partially “cleaning” the list of sites, I started manual analysis:

• checking topics and content;
• inbound link profile;
• backlink anchors;
• their growth dynamics.

Theme and content

The theme and content of the site are one of the main selection criteria. You need to check them manually, so it's more rational to do this when some of the resources have already been weeded out.

What to look for:

• whether the site is one of your competitors - in this case, of course, the link will not be placed;
• whether there is a suitable section in the general media for posting your article;
• on the general appearance of the site and the clickability of elements on the site;
• Are there intrusive ads?
• how publications are designed - is the text structured, are there any typos in it.

Analysis of backlinks of donor sites

It is worth looking at the backlinks of potential donors to make sure that the placement is safe and that spam and low-quality sites do not massively link to the resource.

In Ahrefs, it's best to view incoming links in the "One link per domain" mode in the "Backlinks" report to get an idea of the site's link profile.

But if there are few backlinks, you can watch unique ones.

Ahrefs provides the Backlink Checker tool for free, but it only shows the top 100 backlinks.

When analyzing, you should pay attention to DR (Domain Rating) and UR (URL Rating): it is desirable that high rates prevail. I selected sites in the link profile of which most of the resources were with a DR of 25.

Backlink anchors

Anchors of backlinks pointing to a potential donor site should be natural, preferably the prevalence of anchors in the form of the site name, and the share of commercial anchors should be minimal.

Anchors can be viewed in Ahrefs in the corresponding report.

And also in Serpstat.

Link mass growth dynamics

It is most convenient to track the growth of links according to the schedule: it should be smooth, without jumps.

In Ahrefs, you can see such a graph in the Overview report.

Contact search

After I have selected the most relevant and high-quality sites on which I would like to be placed based on a set of criteria, it is necessary to collect their email addresses. This can be done automatically using Netpeak Checker:

1. Preliminarily form in a Google spreadsheet using the formula =CONCATENATE pages with contacts / kontakty / kontaktu / kontakti fragments, since contact information is not always indicated on the main page of the site.

2. Add all the resulting URLs to Netpeak Checker, mark the "Email addresses" item in the parameters and start collecting. This is what the results look like.

3. Export data, delete generated pages for which contacts were not found.
4. Manually search for contacts from sites for which email addresses could not be collected. If email is not specified on the site, you need to find other ways of contact (for example, a feedback form).

Formation of a letter to the webmaster

After collecting email addresses, you need to write a letter to representatives of the sites. Most often these are webmasters. It is important to clearly indicate in the subject and body of the letter the purpose of the appeal - the placement of an eternal link. In addition to the price, you should also ask about the type of link being placed (dofollow / nofollow / sponsored), content language (relevant for multilingual regions), article size, payment method.

An example of correspondence with a site representative

If the site conditions are not suitable, it is worth reporting this in a letter.

Selection of relevant sites by price and metrics

When there are both metrics and the cost of placement, you can finally decide on the relevant sites based on the ratio of price and quality. When collecting metrics, I have already removed sites with very low rates from the list (for example, sites with DR less than 25 and traffic less than 5 thousand per month). Further, the rule “everything is known in comparison” will apply, that is, when deciding whether to place / not place a link on a particular site, its metrics and cost should be compared with other sites from the list.

Several scenarios are possible here:

Here is an example of the relationship between placement cost and metrics. High prices are highlighted in red, controversial prices and metrics that leave much to be desired are highlighted in yellow.

For the convenience of selecting and compiling a monthly list of purchases, sites can be divided into three categories:

• low performance and price;
• high performance and price;
• high performance and low price.

And mix them - so the reference mass will be balanced.

Writing an article taking into account the requirements of the sites

After selecting the sites that are optimal in terms of price and quality, it is necessary to prepare content taking into account their requirements.

It is necessary to draw up a TOR for a copywriter, in which to indicate:

• the topic of the article;
• the language of the article (if necessary);
• text volume;
• keywords;
• the link being placed and the anchor, whether it is possible to decline the anchor, and in what part of the article it is desirable to place the link (as a rule, closer to the beginning);
• requirements for meta tags and article title (if necessary);
• whether H2-H3 level headings are needed;
• the main theses of the article;
• requirements for the design of the text (numbered and bulleted lists, tables);
• the presence of images, the need to prescribe alt and title attributes for them;
• the percentage of the uniqueness of the article and the verification service.

Example requirements for text

Placing an article on a donor site

The finished article is sent to the webmaster of the site. After placement, it is important to check:

1. Link correctness. The most common mistakes are placements with the http protocol instead of https, with an extra slash at the end, or vice versa, without it, so that a redirect occurs during the transition.
2. Link attributes (dofollow or nofollow - depending on the arrangements). In the first case, you can index links, this will give additional link weight.
3. Is the page of the article in the noindex tag closed?
4. Text on the points of the TK (are the headings marked up, are the alt and title attributes for images spelled out, are lists and tables displayed correctly, etc.).

If there are errors, you need to contact the site representative and ask for corrections. In practice, changes can be made quickly - within a few hours. If everything is placed correctly, thank you for posting.

Analysis of link placement results

Two or three months after the link is placed, it is worth checking the position of the page by anchor (if the anchor link was placed) and traffic.

Positions can be checked in Google Search Console for the last 2 months and compared with data from 2 months before placement.

Page traffic data for 2 months can be obtained in Google Analytics in the Landing Pages report by looking at the number of new users for the specified date range. Also in the "Traffic Sources - Channels" report of Google Analytics, you can see the sites from which the referral traffic was sent, and understand whether there were transitions from the donor site following the posted link.