What is Link Prospecting?
Link prospecting is the process of identifying and evaluating websites that could potentially link to your site. Think of it as the research phase before you start any link building campaign.
It’s not just about finding any website with a “Write for Us” page or a decent Domain Rating. Effective prospecting means finding sites that are genuinely relevant to your niche, have real traffic, and won’t get your site penalized six months down the line.
Here’s what link prospecting actually involves:
- Identifying potential linking opportunities based on your specific strategy
- Evaluating site quality beyond surface-level metrics
- Assessing topical relevance to ensure the link actually makes sense
- Finding contact information for the right people
- Building a organized list you can actually work with
The prospecting phase typically takes up 30-40% of your total link building time, but it’s time well spent. A solid prospect list means better response rates, higher-quality links, and less time wasted on dead ends.
Why Link Prospecting Matters (More Than You Think)
Poor prospecting is expensive. Not just in the obvious ways like wasted outreach hours, but in the hidden costs that pile up over time.
Time drain. When you prospect poorly, you end up reaching out to sites that will never respond, don’t accept guest posts, or worse, would hurt your rankings if they did link to you. That’s hours of outreach work down the drain.
Budget waste. If you’re buying links through a marketplace (or working with agencies that do), bad prospecting means you’re spending money on links that don’t move the needle. A DR 50 link from an irrelevant site is just an expensive bullet point in a report.
Risk exposure. Prospecting without proper evaluation means you might end up with links from PBNs, link farms, or sites that Google will devalue in the next core update. Then you’re stuck doing link audits and disavow files instead of building your business.
Missed opportunities. The flip side? Good prospecting uncovers link opportunities your competitors haven’t found yet. Those are the links that actually move rankings because they’re from real sites with real audiences.
The reality is that most businesses either skip prospecting entirely (and just spam anyone with a contact form) or over-rely on tools that spit out thousands of “prospects” without any real filtering. Neither approach works.
Step 1: Choose Your Link Building Strategy First
You can’t prospect effectively if you don’t know what you’re prospecting for. Different link building strategies require completely different prospecting approaches.
Guest posting means you’re looking for sites that publish contributed content, have clear editorial standards, and cover topics adjacent to yours. You need sites with “Write for Us” pages, active blogs, and multiple authors.
Digital PR requires finding journalists, news sites, and publications that cover your industry. Your prospect list looks completely different – you’re tracking reporters, not webmasters.
Resource page link building means finding pages that curate tools, guides, or links in your niche. These are often .edu sites, government resources, or comprehensive industry directories.
Broken link building needs sites with outdated external links in your topic area. Your prospecting focuses on finding link rot, not just any high-authority site.
Link insertions (or niche edits) mean prospecting for existing content where your link would genuinely add value. You’re looking for articles with clear content gaps or outdated information.
At Search Royals, we see a lot of businesses jump straight into prospecting without this strategic clarity. They end up with a mixed bag of prospects that don’t fit any coherent strategy. Then they wonder why their outreach converts at 2% instead of 15%.
Pick your strategy first. Then prospect accordingly.
If you’re not sure which strategy makes sense for your business, our link building marketplace lets you browse vetted opportunities across different strategies so you can see what’s actually available in your niche before committing to one approach.
Step 2: Set Your Quality Criteria (Beyond Domain Rating)
Here’s where most people mess up. They filter for DA 30+ or DR 40+ and call it a day. Then they wonder why their $500 DR 55 link didn’t move their rankings at all.
Domain Rating and Domain Authority are helpful signals, but they’re terrible decision-makers on their own. Google doesn’t rank sites based on Ahrefs metrics. They rank based on relevance, trust, and user signals that are much harder to fake.
What actually matters for link quality:
Topical relevance. This is non-negotiable. A link from a DR 30 site in your exact niche will outperform a DR 60 link from a random industry every single time. We use what we call the “onion model” – five layers of relevance that determine how valuable a link really is:
- Website level – Is the entire site about your topic?
- Category level – Is the section of the site relevant?
- Article level – Is the specific page related to your content?
- Section level – Does the link appear in a relevant paragraph?
- Anchor text level – Does the anchor make contextual sense?
The deeper you go, the more relevant the link. A link from a marketing blog (website level) → in the SEO category (category level) → in an article about link building (article level) → in a paragraph about prospecting (section level) → with anchor text about evaluation criteria (anchor level) is exponentially more valuable than a sitewide footer link from a higher DR site.
Real organic traffic. Check if the site actually gets visitors. A DR 45 site with 100 monthly visits is probably a PBN or a dead blog. Use Ahrefs’ traffic estimates, but also just visit the site. Do they have recent comments? Social shares? Any sign of life?
Content quality. Read a few articles. Are they clearly written by humans who know the topic? Or are they thin, keyword-stuffed content farms? If you wouldn’t want to read the site yourself, why would Google value a link from it?
Link profile health. Check their outbound links. Do they link to 50 different random niches? That’s a link seller. Do they have natural editorial links to authoritative sources? That’s a real site.
Editorial standards. For guest posting, do they publish anything that comes through, or do they have clear quality standards? Sites that publish 10 articles per day with zero editing are not worth your time.
Yes, this takes longer than filtering for DR 40+ and calling it done. But you’ll build a prospect list of 50 quality opportunities instead of 500 mediocre ones. And that 50 will convert better and deliver actual results.
Step 3: Find Your Link Prospects
Now for the actual prospecting. You’ve got your strategy, you’ve got your criteria – time to build the list.
Competitor Backlink Analysis
This is the fastest way to find proven link opportunities. If your competitors are getting links from a site, you probably can too.
How to do it:
- Identify 3-5 direct competitors who rank for your target keywords
- Run their domains through Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Filter their backlinks by follow/nofollow (focus on follow) and DR (set a minimum that makes sense for your niche)
- Export the list and remove obvious junk (sitewide links, directory spam, PBNs)
The beauty of this approach is you’re finding sites that already link to your type of content. They’ve demonstrated they’re open to linking to businesses like yours.
Pro tip: Look for sites that link to multiple competitors. If a website has linked to three of your competitors but not you, that’s a qualified prospect worth prioritizing.
Google Search Operators
Sometimes the simplest methods work best. Google is still the most powerful prospecting tool if you know how to use it.
Useful search operators for prospecting:
- “your topic” + “write for us” – Finds guest posting opportunities
- “your topic” + “submit guest post” – Alternative guest post finder
- “your topic” + “resources” – Discovers resource pages
- “your topic” + intitle:links – Finds curated link lists
- “your topic” + inurl:links – Another variation for link pages
Don’t just stop at page one. Quality prospects often appear on pages 2-5 where there’s less competition from other link builders.
Content Explorer in Ahrefs
Content Explorer lets you find content in your niche that’s performed well. This is useful for identifying sites that could benefit from linking to your content.
Search for keywords related to your topic, filter by metrics (DR, traffic, referring domains), and look for articles where your content would genuinely add value as an additional resource.
This works especially well for link insertion campaigns where you’re reaching out to suggest adding your link to existing content.
Manual Research
Tools are great, but sometimes you need to use your eyes. Browse industry forums, subreddits, Facebook groups, and LinkedIn communities in your niche. See which sites people actually reference and share.
These tend to be the most authoritative and trusted sites in your space because real people are voluntarily sharing them. That’s exactly what you want.
Step 4: Evaluate and Filter Your Prospects
You’ve probably got a spreadsheet with 200+ potential prospects now. Time to cut it down to the ones worth pursuing.
Create a simple scoring system. Assign points for:
- Relevance (0-5 points using the onion model layers)
- Domain metrics (0-3 points based on DR/DA)
- Traffic (0-3 points based on estimated monthly visitors)
- Content quality (0-3 points based on your manual review)
- Link profile health (0-2 points based on their outbound link patterns)
Any prospect scoring below 8-10 points gets removed from the list. You’re looking for quality, not quantity.
Watch for red flags:
- Sites with thousands of outbound links to unrelated niches
- Content that reads like it was spun or machine-translated
- No clear author attribution or editorial oversight
- Suspicious traffic patterns (huge spikes followed by drops)
- Links being sold openly in the footer or sidebar
- Cookie-cutter “write for us” pages with zero actual guidelines
If a site looks sketchy, it probably is. Trust your gut. One bad link isn’t worth the risk, especially when you could spend that outreach time on legitimate prospects.
If evaluating hundreds of prospects sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. This is exactly why we built our link building marketplace with pre-vetted publishers. Every site is evaluated by our team before it’s available, so you can skip straight to choosing relevant opportunities instead of spending days filtering spam.
Step 5: Find Contact Information
You’ve got a solid prospect list. Now you need to find the right person to contact.
Where to look:
- Check the “About” or “Contact” page first (obvious but often overlooked)
- Look for author bios on recent articles if you’re pitching guest posts
- Use LinkedIn to find content managers, editors, or site owners
- Try email finding tools like Hunter.io or Apollo if the above fails
- Check Twitter/X bios – many editors list their email there
Who to contact:
For guest posting, target editors or content managers, not the CEO. For digital PR, find the specific journalist who covers your beat. For resource pages, try the webmaster or whoever maintains that section of the site.
Generic “info@” or “contact@” emails have terrible response rates. Find the actual human who makes content decisions.
Manual vs. Automated Prospecting
Should you prospect manually or use automated tools?
Manual prospecting takes longer but gives you deeper insight into each prospect. You catch quality signals that tools miss. You spot opportunities others overlook. You build a more targeted list.
Automated prospecting lets you scale faster and process more data. You can analyze thousands of backlinks or content pieces quickly. You can systematically find patterns across your entire industry.
The best approach? Use both. Let tools do the heavy lifting of finding initial prospects, then manually evaluate and filter them before adding to your outreach list.
At Search Royals, we use Ahrefs for the bulk discovery work, but every prospect gets a human review before we approve it for our marketplace. There’s no substitute for actually looking at a site and making a judgment call.
Common Link Prospecting Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
Mistake 1: Chasing Domain Rating above everything else. A DR 70 link from an irrelevant site is worthless. Focus on relevance first, metrics second.
Mistake 2: Building massive prospect lists without evaluation. 500 unqualified prospects is worse than 50 qualified ones. Quality over quantity isn’t a cliché – it’s how link building actually works.
Mistake 3: Ignoring link velocity signals. If a site went from 100 referring domains to 1,000 in six months, they’re probably selling links aggressively. That’s not where you want your link.
Mistake 4: Not checking outbound links. A site that links to everyone isn’t selective. Google knows this. Your link from them will carry less weight.
Mistake 5: Skipping the manual site visit. Spend 60 seconds actually looking at each prospect. You’ll catch red flags that no tool can identify.
Final Thoughts
Link prospecting isn’t glamorous. It’s research work that happens before you send a single outreach email. But it’s the difference between a 5% acceptance rate and a 20% acceptance rate. Between links that move rankings and links that just look good in a report.
The businesses that win at link building aren’t the ones with the best outreach templates or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who prospect smarter, target better, and build relationships with sites that actually matter.
Start with strategy. Set real quality standards. Use tools to scale your research but always filter manually. And remember: one relevant link beats ten irrelevant ones, every single time.
If you want to skip the prospecting headache entirely, check out Search Royals’ marketplace where we’ve already done the vetting work. Or if you prefer the agency route, we offer full-service link building where we handle prospecting, outreach, and placement while you focus on running your business.
Either way, prospect smarter. Your rankings will thank you.
