In a recent Office Hours hangout, John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, suggested that a Google-friendly way to acquire links is to “[create] content that you know will attract links” and “[reach] out to other sites” to let them know about it.
Sounds straightforward enough, right?
Well, the article that I pitched is one of my best pieces of content ever. When I shared a TL;DR version on the /r/BigSEO subreddit, it got nearly 80 upvotes and a silver award (which I made sure to mention in my outreach email for the sake of social proof).
And boy, this post attracts links! In the last 30 days alone, it has picked up “followed” links from 15 legit DR50+ websites with 1,000+ monthly search traffic (no email outreach involved):
Data via Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
In other words, I had a decent example of “interesting content that I know will attract links” (as described by John). So how much did that help me in acquiring links to it?
The only way I can judge that is by the number of compliments I received in response to my outreach emails. And I’m afraid I barely got any.
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
A rare compliment about the article I was pitching
I got a strong impression that none of the people I reached out to read my article. I’m pretty sure they only skimmed through it at best before replying to my email.
And I can’t blame them. Would YOU stop whatever you were doing and read a 6000+ word article that some random person pitched to you in an email asking for a link?
I wouldn’t.
So, if all of these people didn’t even read my article, how did I get links?
Well, the quality of my content allowed me to create a compelling pitch and give the other person the confidence that they will be linking to a quality resource without the need to read it. Because no one wants to link to garbage, right?
So what makes your content great?
Wrong answers: length, details, images, etc.
Right answers: unique ideas, new research, experiments, the amount of work that went into it, etc.
But even with a highly compelling pitch, you will soon discover that most people don’t care about your content. Maybe they’re too busy, or the topic is no longer of interest to them, or they don’t think that a random person can produce anything worthy of their attention.
Let’s take a closer look at this last one.