How Should I Filter Sites for Guest Post Outreach?

[Grey]

For context, I'm just getting started this month. I'm targeting low competition keywords in the self-help sector looking to monetize with ads (to begin with).

My question is about guest posting. Is there a cutoff (using DA or some other metric) where I shouldn't bother with pitching/submitting a guest post to a given site?

 

[Ryuzaki]

My question is about guest posting. Is there a cutoff (using DA or some other metric) where I shouldn't bother with pitching/submitting a guest post to a given site?

It really depends on a lot of factors on your side and theirs:

• If you don't have any or have very few links, take what you can get
• Sometimes low DA links become high DA links but you have to get in early
• More often, low DA links stay low DA and eventually go offline
• You're more likely to get a yes from a lower DA site than a big one that's spammed all day with requests
• There's more than just link metrics, especially as a young site yourself: Relevancy & Topical Authority

I'd suggest that link metrics aren't the only thing you'll want to look at. I wouldn't look until after I receive a yes response but you at least want to make sure you haven't gotten a yes from a PBN site or something crazy. Actually visit the sites once you've filtered it down by getting a response.

I'd also think your lower-end cut-off should rise as your own metric rises. But at the same time, there will be sites with lower metrics than yours that are obviously professional and taking great care that you'll want to get a link from before they become giants.

The problem is this is a numbers game that has to be automated. I wouldn't scrape every site in a niche and visit it to see if they're an "upcomer who might be amazing later" but if I'm doing my normal work and come across one that seems that way, I'd add them into the outreach process if I had already filtered them out by metric.

 

[Grey]

Actually visit the sites once you've filtered it down by getting a response.

That seems like it's probably more efficient than what I'm doing, especially if I increase volume. I'm trying to see how it works currently since it's something I've never done before, and I'm taking notes on how to streamline this as I go.

Getting started, I made a list of about 50 sites to look at first to work at in a batch while searching for some keywords and some footprints. I broke them up into groups (roughly: need to pitch, need to send an article for consideration, irrelevant or spammy crap), and was mainly seeing if I should skip any sites based on other metrics that I don't really know anything about at this point.

I think I'll just stick to making sure they're relevant and not spammy as fuck and go from there. Thanks for the breakdown.

 

[JamaicanMoose]

It really depends on a lot of factors on your side and theirs:

• If you don't have any or have very few links, take what you can get
• Sometimes low DA links become high DA links but you have to get in early
• More often, low DA links stay low DA and eventually go offline
• You're more likely to get a yes from a lower DA site than a big one that's spammed all day with requests
• There's more than just link metrics, especially as a young site yourself: Relevancy & Topical Authority

I'd suggest that link metrics aren't the only thing you'll want to look at. I wouldn't look until after I receive a yes response but you at least want to make sure you haven't gotten a yes from a PBN site or something crazy. Actually visit the sites once you've filtered it down by getting a response.

I'd also think your lower-end cut-off should rise as your own metric rises. But at the same time, there will be sites with lower metrics than yours that are obviously professional and taking great care that you'll want to get a link from before they become giants.

The problem is this is a numbers game that has to be automated. I wouldn't scrape every site in a niche and visit it to see if they're an "upcomer who might be amazing later" but if I'm doing my normal work and come across one that seems that way, I'd add them into the outreach process if I had already filtered them out by metric.

To second what @Ryuzaki said: some of the best links I've ever gotten were on sites with terrible metrics (DR under 10, very few backlinks). They were well-designed, professional sites that were brand new and hadn't started picking up steam yet. Eventually they became DA60+ industry-leading behemoths. If a site looks legit but has shit metrics, it's usually still worth getting a link from.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

We've been doing guest posting with 5 full time employees, 4 workers and 1 manager, who orders the articles, sends payment, manages workers, sends guest posts, for 5 years now. The paradigm is different than what Ryuzaki said since the 4 employees do their job full time. Also, a few of the problems of this operation has already been solved elsewhere, so we might as well use the solutions here.

The first question is, "How do I know if a site is spam?" If a site is spam, we should disregard it, as a link from a spam site is bad. The people at Majestic already did research on it and a TrustFlow/CitationFlow ratio of less than .3 means that it's an extreme outlier. TrustFlow is a weighted score, where a higher score means that the site is closer to seed sites, which are known to manually curate their outbound links. In other words, a high TF score says that the site probably received it's backlinks from human reviewed sites. CitationFlow is Majestic's calculation of PageRank. PageRank, basically, is a weighted score of how authoritative a site is, based upon the number of webmasters linking to that site. Therefore, the TF/CF ratio shows you, of the authority a site has from PageRank, how much of that came from sites that were human reviewed. If the score is under .3, it means that the site probably got their links from non-human reviewed websites, which is another way of saying it received it's backlinks from spam.

A good 10% of the links can be discarded with that filter. I then filter out sites that are under CF 20. Anything less than that won't move the needle for my site, but we're CF60. We'd need 90,000 CF20 backlinks, where the website only links to our site and no other, to move to CF70. I should make the cut off CF30 now, to think about it. It'll reduce the amount of 9,000!

Anyways, the second question is, "How do I know if the site is a real website and not one created to manipulate SE metrics?" You want a guest post on a real domain, with real traffic. You don't want a guest post on a site created to manipulate SE metrics, since that'll risk your site too, if an algorithm update comes around. One manipulation is expired domains. Someone can just buy an expired domain for $200, and sell guest posts on it for $100 each. You wouldn't want to buy that link yourself, since that webmaster would link to any webmaster willing to pay the fee. I've talked to a webmaster who did such a thing, inadvertently (he was a senior citizen blogger who didn't know that much about technology). Google gave him an email on WMT saying that all out-bound links on his site were being treated as no-follow, since his OBLs were too odd. Another situation is that, since the site offers paid guest posting, Google can use the site as a honeypot and investigate all sites that receive a link from it. The sites receiving links from it are probably link buyers. It's not good to have your site in that cluster of links. Therefore, you should look at the site's history on Archive.org. You want to do two things: 1.) check if the site's owners changed and 2.) check if the backlink profile is legitimate. For #1, if the site did change owners, what is a possible reason for the new ownership? Does it make sense for the domain name? If the only reason you can come up with is, to manipulate SE metrics, then it's a spam site masquerading as a real site. For #2, you want to go through their backlinks on Majestic or Ahrefs and see if they have real links or not. If the site is CF25 because of blog comments, just skip it. You can just save yourself the money by making the comments on those sites too, if you wish. You're looking to obtain links from sites, who have backlinks you can't obtain. That'll put you 1 link away from whatever the other sites are, for good TrustFlow.

By doing this, my site's 1 link away from the UN, a few banks, universities, government sites, etc. It's pretty easy once you've sat down, studied the theories, and created your own plan.

As for the question of, "This site looks really good, should I contact the webmaster even though the metrics are bad?" I would not. With 5 people on the team, who can perform outreach at a rate of 50 domains/hour, I need to give them 400,000 domains/year to contact. We basically run through our industry once a year. If the small site does improve its metric, they'll most likely be contacted by us in the future.

 

[Concept]

When vetting guest post opportunities here are my general rules of thumb:

• Filter by traffic. Must have more than 500 views a month (site-wide) according to ahrefs - this tells me that google at least gives them some credit. It also filters out 90% of spam sites.
• Is the site relevant to my niche, at least directly or indirectly. Eg, if I'm a protein affiliate site, I can target bodybuilding and fitness niches, but also general health and diet style niches too. But I wouldn't both getting a link from a site about yarn and knitting. (unless its something DR 80+, then I'm happy to get the power boost)
• "Guest post", "Guest Contributor" etc should not be anywhere on the page that I write the guest post. This includes the header and footer. They shouldn't include "Write for Us", "Be A Guest Blogger" etc . I want to reduce my footprint, and not hint to google that I've "paid" for content - whether by literally paying or paying via free content. Might be a bit tin hat SEO but I've seen too many people burnt otherwise.
• I check to see if it's a bad neighborhood. Are there links to porn, gambling, CBD or other dodgy niches. Are these guys excepting guest posts from everyone? If so, I'm out.
• I usually don't accept anything less that DR 20. But there have been exceptions. Particularly if they are super relevant are have a shitton of traffic despite their low DR.

If a site passes the above criteria, then I'll reach out to them.

 

[DarkRed]

If a site passes the above criteria, then I'll reach out to them.

How much are you paying for guest posts? What's your inital offer for a DR 40 site with decent traffic for example?

 

[Concept]

How much are you paying for guest posts? What's your inital offer for a DR 40 site with decent traffic for example?

I'll see if I can get them for free first. If they only accept paid guest posts, I let them make the first offer, see if I can get lower.

Link inserts, if I pay I usually pay between $20-$50 US. Guest posts, if I pay, can be similar. Sometimes up to $100. But then I have the added cost and time associated with actually getting them written...

These days though, if I don't want to screw around with outreach and need some guest posts fast I just opt to pay for someone like Authority Builders to do it for me. Yeah, they might be a bit more expensive, but sometimes I don't have the time to do it myself or get one of my team to do it, so I just do it that way. Haven't had any bad experiences, the sites seem legit and pass my test above, so I stick with them for now.

 

[Cash Builder]

The problem is this is a numbers game that has to be automated.

This is so true, and it's becoming truer with every year that passes. Most sites that have any kind of authority or traffic know that they can charge a fee for every guest post.

There are still a lot of sites out there that don't charge, it's just taking longer to find them.

My last guest posting campaign was a couple of years ago now, and off the top of my head the stats looked something like:

For every 100 outreach emails sent, I got 30 replies. From these replies, I got 28 asking for a guest posting fee, and 2 were happy to post content for free. The sites that didn’t ask for a fee were usually on the lower end of the metrics scale.

Of course, these are just averages, and I was sending 1000s of emails per campaign so I got some decent links out of it. But you definitely need to automate this and come up with a good system or you will quickly become demoralized.

 

[bernard]

When I began doing guest posts I simply noted which showed up in Google for various searches and then I filtered those who looked like paid guest post mills.

Overall I had the most success with:

1. Community building affiliate sites that I wasn't competing with

2. Personal blogs that were monetised

I didn't look too much at Ahrefs stats and such. It's rather easy to tell if a site is a real website or a guest post mill.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

When vetting guest post opportunities here are my general rules of thumb:
...
If a site passes the above criteria, then I'll reach out to them.

But you definitely need to automate this and come up with a good system or you will quickly become demoralized.

@Cash Builder While systematizing is needed to compete with big sites, the problem is that most people on here lack the education and experience needed to create a system, educate their staff on that system, and run a system. It no longer become entrepreneurship or solo-entrepreneurship but management and education. Tim Ferris would argue how rules of thumb are a good shorthand to achieving things with the 80/20 principal but such a mentality doesn't work when you're trying to manage employees, which makes such a mindset self-limiting.

When employees are doing tasks, they are following procedures, as set out in SOPs, which is training. However, they're also making decisions, which requires knowledge and education. If employees aren't educated in the knowledge required for their job, they'll ask their manager for decisions. Asking the manager for decisions is needed at times but if it's routine, then it was a fault of the manager for not empowering his or her employee with knowledge, so that he or she can make decisions on his or her own. Many people interoperate this as the worker being stupid but, in fact, it's the manager not having the academic capital to teach his or her workers.

That's the flaw with how-to advice and procedural knowledge. The procedure is as good as the assumptions it uses and limiting yourself to such thinking limits your ability to recognize, understand, analyze, and teach. If the assumption is wrong in a situation and the worker doesn't realize it, he or she will execute the procedure unknowingly and produce wrong results, unknowingly. This approach is very mechanical and machine like, which is not favorable for the employer or employee. The employees need to know the procedural knowledge as well as intellect for their job, so that they can make decisions on their own. The employer can achieve this, by educating his or her staff.

You simply can't treat tech work as if you're on an assembly line. People don't work like that and tech work doesn't lend itself to that. Just having simple rules to follow is for the stupid who can't comprehend complex thoughts. Like any other simplification of life, such as mathematical models, it's only as good as its assumptions, while removing other data. What's going on might be totally different and the simplification simply misses what's going on.

To simplify what I'm saying, if you follow how-to guides for business, you're limiting yourself to solo-entrepreneurship, since you won't be able to teach the knowledge required to make decisions for exceptional cases. The 80/20 principal does fail 20% of the time or, for 20% of the time, the employee would have to bother you for decisions. That's your fault for not educating them and it'll irritate you. If you ever want to get past this, you'll need to learn how to teach as well as learn the intellect of your job, not simply follow how-to guides.

 

[Cash Builder]

100% agree with most of what you have said, although when I started my first guest posting campaign I had no prior experience and I never had any formal education on the subject. 3 years later, I now have the confidence in my ability and the systems in place that I could easily get 20 – 30 links per month through guest posting. The education and experience was gained by trial and error, and it’s something most people can achieve.

I think creating systems is something that you learn as you go, and you will never truly have a complete system as there will always need to be tweaks made along the way. That being said, I run my campaigns myself and don’t have any employees to manage (apart from writers). I’d guess most people on here are running smaller sites and won’t have to worry too much about managing staff.

When it comes to managing bigger sites and competing with the big boys, it’s true that a change in mindset will be required. To step up to the next level of where I am currently, I’ll have to look at becoming more of a manager and educator. For the level of sites that I am running just now, following a set of steps and procedures seems to be working out fine.