Blogger Outreach is now a must have part of any SEO Agencies service and serves both small and multinational businesses. It’s part of the Google Jigsaw to climb the rankings but fortunately one of the easier approaches to both understand and implement.
Simply put, Blogger Outreach is where one website gives a link within one of its pages to another website. This can take many forms, image links, text links, no follow, sponsored, to name a few.
Going into 2024 Google has stated that links still form an important part of Google’s search algorithm, so Blogger Outreach is still relevant. Over the years Google has got more sophisticated in measuring the quality of links coming into a website but now more than ever, there are tools to check the quality of bloggers websites before engaging.
Different Options to Gain Links?
Your Business Contacts
Let’s start with the free easier ways. Lean on your suppliers to either write articles about your company or services to post on their website or maybe even write an article for them. Next up is contacting your customers, you have less leverage but if you’ve done a great job and they have an active blog then they might be willing to post an article you’ve written.
If you engage in business networking, then reach out to your contact and offer to post articles on your website in exchange for an article on their website. Make sure the content is relevant and in keeping with each others offering.
Once you’ve exhausted all your ‘known’ business contacts we then you can move onto the paid options.
Product Based Blogger Reviews
If you sell a product then many bloggers will write reviews of bloggers if the products are sent to them for free. You can find these groups of bloggers hanging out in Facebook groups. The cost is just in the product but of course there is no guarantee of flattering product review if the product isn’t great so be careful. There are also bloggers who offer to post reviews but really, they are just after free stuff so again be careful.
Service Businesses
If, like us, you are more based on offering a service rather than a product then the option above isn’t open to you. But if you offer software or digital assets, you can offer these for free in exchange for reviews or if you have a service that you can give someone a taste for, then the same concept exists.
Make sure you use a Good Blogger
Nowadays it’s very easy to set up a website and declare yourself a blogger and also quite easy to set up hundreds of websites in bulk to trick tools like Moz into giving you a good Domain Authority score. So how do you know the good from the bad Bloggers.
Avoid The Dreaded ‘Gmailers’
You will have lots of emails from Gmail accounts claiming to be Blogger Outreach or link building specialists offering big lists of websites with high Domain Authority (DA) and may offer some additional details. Beware, they use Gmail accounts for a reason. They mass spam thousands of email addresses offering their services then they either take your money or deliver links from dodgy websites. They are usually not based in the UK, meaning you have limited or no legal recourse if there are any issues. Here are a few of our favorite introductions.
The Ideal Blogger
What you are looking for is a Blogger who already has their own audience, posts blogs regularly, has google rankings, gets regular traffic from Google, has a low Spam score, and has a high Domain Authority. If you’ve found a potential blogger you can check their Spam Score and Domain Authority using a tool called Moz, then you can check their traffic using SEMrush and to judge whether they have their own audience you can check out their socials. Some of these tools are paid for but have free basic offerings to help you.
This can all take quite some time which is why digital marketing professionals and business owners tend to use companies like LinkSync who do all of these checks for you, so that you can just choose the quality of the Blogger based on their Domain Authority, then rest assured that you’ll be delivered a good quality link for your website.
The Bad Bloggers or Private Blogger Networks (PBNs)
As mentioned above, it’s very easy to set up a website and claim to be a blogger but crafting good relevant content written by real people (not AI) takes time. And getting traffic to the site also takes time and effort. So, the ‘Bad’ or maybe more generously, early-stage bloggers will have small websites with not much content or maybe worse just bad content.
Even worse than getting links from tiny new websites is the PBN crew. These are websites set up in bulk that can look very professional with lots of content, but they are set up purely for link building purposes. They will have hundreds if not thousands of pages but will contain links to all their PBN friends i.e. it’s an almost closed circle of fake links. Google does not like these websites, so you don’t want links from these. Beware, that a professional looking website can still be part of PBN and only doing due diligence using Moz/SEMrush will identify the truth over whether it’s a safe to use website.
What can you do if you a Bad Blogger Links to your Site?
If you identify a bad, or spammy, blogger is linking to your website and most likely negatively impacting your Google rankings, then you have a two main options:
- You can tell Google to ignore the website when reviewing your site by submitting a disavow file using Googles disavow tool.
- You can contact the blogger directly and ask for the link to be removed.
If you’d like a report showing how many spammy links point to your website, then get in touch with us and we will send you a report with insights on what you can do.
To wrap up, Blogger Outreach done right is a valuable piece of the puzzle to climb the Google rankings. Lots can be done by leveraging your existing contacts and there are agencies like LinkSync that can be sure you are getting good quality links. And don’t buy from the ‘Gmailers’ or PBN crews.