Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Please let me know how to improve this email backlink request
-
Hello,
How can I improve upon this email request:
Your "Links" section contains a lot of good websites, and we would like our site to be added to the list.
Our pagerank 4 website, which carries (Here I said what we carry) You have similar sites located in the "Other" Section on your link page. We would greatly appreciate being added to this list.
Sincerely,
BobW
Webmaster
Our Site Name Here
Email Address Here
Phone Number Here -
No worries - Glad I could help out.
-
Derek,
I meant to click on "Good Answer" for your answer. You really helped. I apologize, and I will click yours first next time.
-
Try this guide. Some templates here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/broken-link-building-guide-from-noob-to-novice
Customize and tailor each email as much as possible. Really look at the target site, follow them on twitter, learn about them, etc
For example, I recently started following a target. I was going to do a broken link email, but soon enough, they were ranting in a blog post about their brand usernames being taken by squatters and inactive accounts on twitter/facebook. I used that to reach out to them and suggest what to do to claim their usernames since I actually had the same problem. I didn't even mention or request links, but they are now linking to our homepage and referencing other pages on my site. All I did was sign my emails with my domain name, so they know who i am, where i'm from.
Essentially I made a friend by offering value, and asking for nothing in exchange. That target would have been tough to get a link from otherwise.
In case that hadn't worked out, I WOULD have eventually asked directly for the link after having made a great first impression.
-
In the past, I have offered a variety of benefits to the sites I am contacting. Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:
-
Relevant and original blogs or articles
-
sharing their site or advertisement on social media profile
-
writing a testimonial for businesses or individuals that I have worked with
-
"how-to" articles
-
Infographics or visual guides
-
Bringing typos or broken links to webmaster's attention
-
A reciprocal link
-
-
Hi Klarke,
What would the title and first sentence of the email be if I'm doing "broken' link building?
-
Hi Derek,
What could I offer to benefit them in my case?
-
In my experience with sending out link request emails, they always want to know how it benefits them. Whether you are offering content, infographics, guest blog post, broken link corrections, reciprocal link, endorsing them on a social media or providing a testimonial for their business, I have seen the best results by telling them how it will benefit their website.
Create a compelling title that mentions the benefit so you have a higher open rate. Getting them to open is half the battle.
Also, try including your website url in the body of the message so it easy for them to click through and review your site:
"Our pagerank 4 website - http://www.example.com - which carries (Here I said what we carry) You have similar sites located in the "Other" Section on your link page."
Make sure your request is short, clear and direct. Possibly rewording your opening sentence to:
"Would you consider adding our site on the "Links" section list?"
-
Yes, they work ok - best to keep an excel sheet to track who you have emailed. If you dont get a response after a couple of weeks resend. If you still dont get a response then move on.
You can pick some links up, but just make sure you don't spam web-masters and that your requests are relevant.
-
Try using 'broken' link building.
There's several guides and posts here on Seomoz. Just search.
Basically, you scan through the list of links, and you'll probably find a few broken or 404 pages. Point those out and also recommend the addition of new resources, including your own. It works extremely well, and you don't come across as the typical emailer that the webmaster probably encounters everyday.
Round off that strategy with a regular guest posts, link bait and other content marketing ...and you're solid.
-
Michael, do you have experience using emails like the one you outlined? How well do they work?
-
Possibly this:
Hi,
Bob here from the ** * * and I wanted to drop an email to you and compliment your site. Nice layout, good info, good resources.
I was looking around at a few different sites for product/service information and I thought your's was one of the best.
That being said, I also noticed you guys have some great content related to product/service. I currently work for a company that maintains a website that offers product/service, www.domainname.com.
We are a nationally recognized, reliable source for product/service on the web and I was wondering if you'd be interested in exchanging/advertising via links between your site and mine?
If not, thanks for the time and keep up the good work!
Thanks,
Bob -
Yes, I read that. I could not locate a name for who I was writing to. I tried to structure the email according to that article. Do you have any specific suggestions?
-
Hi,
There was actually a great post on this subject a few days ago, worth taking a look. I think based on this, you could improve the structure of your email. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-write-email-to-get-a-better-response-rate
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirect old image that has backlinks
Hi Moz Community! I'm doing an audit of a website and did a backlink analysis. In the backlink analysis, there is an image that has 66 backlinks but the image doesn't exist on the website anymore (it was on a website that was created in 2011 - 2 web launches ago). I don't believe a 301 redirect will work for an image that doesn't exist anymore. How would I redirect the image URL (it's WordPress so we have a specific URL that other websites are linking to but get 404 errors) without going to each individual website and requesting they change the URL link? Any advice or recommendations would be great. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 27, 2018, 4:50 PM | BradChandler1 -
Rankings rise after improving internal linking - then drop again
I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position. My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely? Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 13, 2016, 8:55 PM | hjsand1 -
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 4, 2016, 2:19 PM | fablau3 -
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 15, 2016, 5:45 PM | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
Multiple Landing Pages and Backlinks
I have a client that does website contract work for about 50 governmental county websites. The client has the ability to add a link back in the footer of each of these websites. I am wanting my client to get backlink juice for a different key phrase from each of the 50 agencies (basically just my keyphrase with the different county name in it). I also want a different landing page to rank for each term. The 50 different landing pages would be a bit like location pages for local search. Each one targets a different county. However, I do not have a lot of unique content for each page. Basically each page would follow the same format (but reference a different county name, and 10 different links from each county website). Is this a good SEO back link strategy? Do I need more unique content for each landing page in order to prevent duplicate content flags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 12, 2015, 8:59 AM | shauna70840 -
301 Redirect Showing Up as Thousands Of Backlinks?
Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain? This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 6, 2015, 6:40 PM | Sandicliffe0 -
Are backlinks the most important factor in SEO?
I have had an agency state that "Backlinks are the most important factor in SEO". That is how they are justifying their strategy of approaching bloggers. I believe there are a lot more factors than that including Target Market definition, Keyword identification an build content based on these factors. What's everyone's thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 19, 2014, 12:53 PM | AndySalmons0 -
H2 Tag Backlink - is this safe?
I have found that my site is getting a link from a good site, but my concern is that the link is in a H2 tag in the footer of the front page of the site Would getting a link from a site wrapped in H2 tags be safe? The anchor is my sites brand name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 14, 2012, 11:41 AM | JohnPeters0