Guide
Backlink outreach: what to do when the easy links run out
Directory submissions are the floor: cheap, finite, and available to anybody with an afternoon. They stop paying sharply, and what comes after them is the part nobody can automate, which is asking a person. This page is about doing that without becoming the thing everybody deletes.
Why outreach got hard
Because it worked, and then it scaled. Tools made it trivial to send the same message to hundreds of addresses, so everybody did, and now every site owner who has ever published anything receives several a week: the same opening compliment, the same "I noticed your excellent article", the same request.
The consequence is not that outreach stopped working. It is that the mass version stopped working, while the version that always worked, one person writing to another about something specific, still does. Those two are not on the same spectrum: one is correspondence, the other is a mail campaign with a link in it.
Check the page before you write the email
This is the part specific to what we do, and it is the cheapest thing on this page. Before spending an hour researching a site and writing a personal message, spend a minute finding out whether a link from that page could have been worth anything.
- Do its outbound links pass anything? Some sites nofollow everything as policy. That is fine, and it changes what you are asking for: referral traffic, not a link that counts. Read one of its existing links.
- Is the page indexable? Roundups and resource pages are sometimes noindexed, especially if they were built for an ad campaign. Check it.
- Is anybody reading it? A dofollow link on a page nobody visits and nothing links to is worth less than a nofollow on a page with an audience.
Two minutes here saves an hour of writing to somebody whose page could never have given you what you were about to ask for. Check a target page first, no account needed.
Who is actually worth asking
The test is whether you can finish this sentence honestly: a link to me helps their reader because. If you cannot, the answer will be no, and it should be.
- Roundups you belong in. "Best tools for X" lists that predate you, where the omission is genuinely an omission.
- Comparisons missing an option. Somebody wrote about three alternatives and yours is a fourth their reader would want.
- Tutorials solving the problem you solve. A mention helps a reader who is halfway through doing it the hard way.
- People who already mentioned you without linking. The highest hit rate of anything on this list, because the decision to talk about you was already made.
What to write
Short, specific, and obviously not sent to anybody else. Four sentences is plenty: who you are, which page and why it, what you are asking for, and stop.
The parts to cut
The opening compliment, the paragraph about how much you enjoyed their writing, and any sentence explaining why the link benefits them in SEO terms. The first two are what give a template away, and the third tells them you are thinking about your rankings rather than their readers.
Two practical notes worth more than any template. Ask for what you want plainly, rather than opening a conversation you hope becomes a link, because the second wastes their time and yours. And send one follow-up at most: silence is an answer, and the second chase is where correspondence turns into spam.
What we are not going to give you
Benchmarks. You will find articles quoting expected reply rates and conversion figures for outreach; we do not run outreach as a service and have no data of our own, so any number here would be borrowed from somebody whose situation is not yours.
Nor a template to paste. The whole argument of this page is that a message which obviously came from a file is the thing that stopped working, and handing you one would contradict it.
After the yes
Getting agreement is not getting a link. Read the page once it goes up: hard-won editorial links land with a nofollow the writer never mentioned, on pages carrying a noindex, or behind a robots rule, exactly as directory listings do. The effort you spent has no bearing on what the markup says.
And check again later. A link earned by asking is exactly the kind that disappears in a redesign a year on, with nobody telling you.
Questions people actually ask
What is backlink outreach?
Asking a person to link to something of yours, usually by email. That is the whole activity, and it is the point where link building stops being a form you fill in and starts being a request somebody can refuse. It is slower than directory submission and it is where the links that are actually hard to get come from.
Does cold outreach for backlinks still work?
It works in proportion to how little it looks like outreach. The template that goes to four hundred people has trained everybody receiving it to delete on sight, which is why the response rate to that kind of message keeps falling. A specific message about a specific page, from somebody who read it, still gets replies, because it is just correspondence.
What should an outreach email say?
What you want, why that page in particular, and nothing else. Say who you are in one line, name the page and the reason it is relevant, make the ask explicit, and stop. Every extra paragraph of flattery makes it more obvious the message was assembled rather than written, and the compliments are what give a template away first.
How many outreach emails should I send?
Fewer, chosen better. Volume is the strategy that produced the current climate, and it is now the least effective use of the same hours: a hundred generic sends convert worse than ten researched ones and cost your domain’s reputation on top. Nobody outside your own sending can give you a meaningful benchmark, so measure your own and ignore published figures.
Should I pay for a link if they ask?
That is the moment outreach becomes buying links, which is against Google’s spam policies and usually a bad purchase anyway: paid links are commonly discounted, which is indistinguishable from being scammed. Paying for placement on a site with real readers can be worth it for the traffic, but be honest with yourself about which of the two you are buying.
What is the best type of site to ask?
One where a link to you would genuinely help their reader, on a page that already exists and already gets visited. Roundups you belong in, comparisons that missed you, tutorials that solve the problem your product solves. If you cannot finish the sentence "this helps their reader because", the answer will be no and it should be.
How do I know the link was worth getting?
Read the page after it goes up. Plenty of hard-won editorial links land with a nofollow the writer never mentioned, or on a page carrying a noindex, or behind a robots rule. The work of getting the link and the value of the link are different things, and only the second one is checkable.
The link you worked hardest for is the one worth watching.
An editorial link took a week of work and can be undone by somebody else's redesign in an afternoon. ShipDR reads every backlink you record on a schedule and tells you the day one stops being live, dofollow or indexable, whether it came from a form or from a conversation.
- Every listing rechecked on a schedule, not once
- Live, dofollow and indexable, read from the page itself
- Told the day a backlink drops or flips
Adding a website and charting its Domain Rating is free, no card. The backlink engine is $10 once, per website, with no subscription.