Getting backlinks on resource pages is one of the more "beginner level" link building strategies.
But just because it's easier, it doesn't mean that it's not effective.
Now the question is, how many "resource pages" are really out there?
And if there are as many as I'm subtly implying, how can you scale this technique to really
make an impact on your link profile?
You're about to learn a simple system to find these link opportunities by the masses.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research
your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now, today is all about resource page link building.
And from the people that I've spoken to, you either love it or you hate it.
Well today, my goal is to make all of you believers in this low-hanging link building
strategy. And more importantly, I want you to be able to start building high quality
backlinks right away.
Let's get started.
So first, what is resource page link building and why is it so effective?
A typical resource page usually lists a bunch of links to helpful resources on a particular topic.
And the reason why it's effective is because unlike a lot of other link building strategies,
the intention behind these pages is literally to link to other resources.
So by reaching out to these pages with solid recommendations, you're contributing to the
purpose of that page.
Whereas, if you're trying to get an editorial link from a blog post, you need to do a little
more convincing since their goal is to deliver their own information rather than link to
external resources.
Now, this link building technique is only a 2-step process.
First, you need to find resource type pages.
And second, you need to send an email to the person in charge of that page with one or
more recommendations from your site.
And for the purpose of this video, we'll be focusing on the prospecting part.
But I won't leave you high and dry, we have a full video on email outreach that'll help
you make your email campaigns more effective.
Alright, so there are a few ways to find link prospects.
The first is the most common, and that's to use search operators within Google.
So I might type "inurl:links.html intitle:fitness".
And you'll see that the majority of the results seem promising.
You can also try other search queries like these:
Now, the great thing about these queries is that you can change any of the words in the
highlighted colors to get completely new results.
For example, change the links.html to links.php, or resources.html, or whatever footprints you
can think of.
After you've done enough variations of your query, you can expand your prospects by
changing the topic.
So instead of "fitness," we might use something like "workout," or "weight training," or "dieting,"
or whatever it may be.
And I'm sure you can imagine how large our list of prospects can get, right?
Next, we need to scrape the URLs from these results pages and put them in a spreadsheet.
And if you haven't already done so, you should change the maximum number of results per page
by going to Settings, Search settings, and then drag the top bar to the end.
Now, to scrape these results, there are a couple tools you can use.
The first is Scraper for Chrome.
After you've installed the plugin, just right click anywhere in the browser and click on
"Scrape similar."
Next, paste this string of XPath code here, and click "Scrape."
And I'll leave that in the description below so you can copy and paste it.
Finally, we'll copy it to our clipboard and paste it into a spreadsheet.
Now, if you're an Ahrefs user, you can just use the SEO toolbar and click on this button up
here to export the results pages that you're on.
Now, rinse and repeat this method until you have a list of prospects that you're satisfied with.
Alright, so you should have a ton of link prospects by now.
Don't worry if you haven't vetted these pages, because we're going to do that right
now and actually filter out a whole bunch of pages without ever having to visit them.
And the tool we're going to use to do that is Screaming Frog Spider.
If you haven't already exported your list of link prospects, do that first, and then
open up Screaming Frog.
And you'll want to make sure that you're using List mode.
One quick side note for those of you who have
a paid license with Screaming Frog and Ahrefs.
You can connect Ahrefs API by going to Configuration, hover over API access, and add your API credentials
when prompted.
This will add various SEO metrics from Ahrefs to your crawl data, which will be super helpful later.
And if you don't, you can use the Batch Analysis tool and connect the data with the VLOOKUP formula.
Alright, so just upload your file here, confirm your list of links, and ScreamingFrog will
start crawling those pages.
Once your crawl is complete, export the results.
Now, let's open up our spreadsheet and we're going to get into vetting these pages.
As you can see, there's a ton of data in here, and we don't need all of it for the purpose
of resource page link building.
So I've actually cleaned up this list to just Address, Status Code, Indexability, Title,
Word Count, Unique External Links, and I've left some Ahrefs metrics in here too.
Now, we need to filter through this data, so I'll create filters for each column.
The first filter that I'll set is for pages that have a 200 response code.
And we're doing this so we don't include redirected or broken pages in our resource
page outreach.
Next, I'll set the Indexability column to only pages that are indexable.
And this is to weed out pages that have been canonicalized to another URL.
Next, I'll set the "Unique External Outlinks" filter to those that link to at least 3 unique pages.
And you could get more loose or strict with these.
That's up to you.
But it's important that you set this because if they have zero external outlinks, then
it means that their resource page is only linking to other internal pages.
So your chance of getting a link there is slim to none.
Finally, I'm going to set a filter on the Address column to exclude URLs that contain
the word "Blogspot" since I won't be interested in contacting those pages.
And I know they do show up frequently for resource page search queries.
And you could add additional footprints, but let's leave it at this for now.
You can also set filters using Ahrefs SEO metrics.
For example, if you only want to focus your attention on websites that have a certain
Domain Rating, you can set a filter here to pages with a Domain Rating of, let's say,
30 or higher.
After you're done setting all of your filters, go to openallurls.com.
And in the text area, you can paste up to 250 URLs at a time.
Just be aware that Screaming Frog uses your computer's resources, and opening a ton of
URLs at once can get very resource heavy.
From here, you would need to manually vet whether or not these sites would be a good
place to get a link.
And as you go through the list, you can just replace the URL with an "x" if you're not
interested in contacting them.
After you're done, just set another condition where the URL cannot equal "x."
And you should now have a solid list of pages.
But why stop here when we can actually export the external links on these resource pages.
And the reason it makes sense to do that is simple: pages with a link from one resource
page will likely have links from others too.
So we can reverse engineer those domains and pages and find other relevant link prospects.
So let's go back to Screaming Frog and run a new crawl with the filtered resource pages
that we'll be contacting.
This time, I'll click on Upload, and choose to paste my list of clean URLs and run the crawl.
After it's done crawling, click on the Bulk Export option, and choose "External Links."
Next, you'll want to open up the file, copy all rows from the Destination column, and
paste them into a tool like this, which will convert the URLs to domains and remove duplicates.
Just make sure to set this checkbox to remove duplicates and then run the filter.
After it's done, copy and paste all of the domains into a sheet because we're going
to run a batch analysis on these domains.
So I'll head on over to Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool and I'll just paste in a good chunk
of domains that were found on our prospects' pages.
Then I'm going to change the target mode to "domain" and I can now get the SEO metrics
for all of these domains at once.
Now, when I'm looking through this list, I'm looking for relevant websites that have a
lot of unique referring domains.
So I'll sort this table by Dofollow referring domains in descending order.
And right away, you can tell that some of the domains are irrelevant like Facebook and Twitter.
But generally speaking, you can look at a domain name, and get a good idea of the type
of content they would produce.
So this one from acefitness.com seems promising. So I'll click on the caret beside the domain
and click on Backlinks, which will open up their backlink profile in Site Explorer.
Next, I'll search for one of our footprints like links.html using the Include filter.
And just like that, you have a lot more resource pages that you can start pitching for links.
Also, you won't need to run another crawl with Screaming Frog on these pages, since the EXT column
shows you the number of external outlinks on that page.
So you can quickly identify whether you have a good chance of gaining a link or not.
From here, all you need to do is reach out to these sites, pitch your resources, and hope
to get a bunch of new quality links back to your site.
So as you can see, there is no shortage of resource pages where you can get backlinks.
You just have to follow the rabbit hole, and you can literally find and qualify thousands
of link prospects in under an hour.
Now if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe.
And if you have any questions, then leave a comment and I'd be happy to jump in.
So keep grinding away and I'll see you in the next SEO tutorial.