Reach Out to the Right People, About the Right Content – Jimmy Rodriguez

My most important link building tip isn’t about what you should do, but what you should not do: don’t suggest backlinks to content providers that have nothing to do with their content.

This seems obvious but comes up often at 3dcart headquarters. We post frequent articles on our eCommerce blog covering a wide variety of topics. Of course, it’s all related in some way to eCommerce, but we have articles about everything from how to start a business to how to make more sales by working gift wrapping into your strategy. While it all fits under the eCommerce umbrella, these articles are clearly about different subjects that make up part of the whole, and they aren’t interchangeable.

We frequently get contacted with requests to add links, and for many of them, we’re happy to work something out. We love having authoritative, useful, and relevant resources brought to our attention so we can link to them. But we also get requests from people who send us links that have nothing to do with the blog post they’re suggesting we add links to.

Sure, their links are eCommerce related, but the topic of the blog post they’re targeting is an entirely different, specific subtopic of eCommerce that their resource doesn’t immediately relate to. In order for us to link to their resource within that specific blog article, we’d have to add a new section to the article just to make the link make sense, which would result in a disorienting swerve in the content. The better solution is not to do this, so these backlink requests are refused.

When you’re ready to reach out to content creators for backlinks, don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Just because the website’s overall topic matches your resource doesn’t mean any given page does. If you make a habit of mistargeting your backlink requests like this, any future requests you send out to the same content creator are even more likely to be ignored. It’s easy to avoid this problem by choosing to reach out about pages that are a better match for your content. If there aren’t any at all on that website or blog, create new resources that are relevant to them or simply move on.