If you manage link outreach, you need a list of relevant sites with a plausible reason to consider your contribution. Most link building fails at qualification, not at outreach. Twenty prospects you spent five minutes checking will beat two hundred you contacted blind. The checks below are how you get from one to the other.
Run the cheap checks first
Each check below costs more than the one above it. Work down the list and stop as soon as a prospect fails.
1. Can you say something specific about this page's subject?
Being in the same industry is not enough. The question is whether you have something to contribute to this page.
A resource list on a topic next to yours is a poor prospect even inside your own field. Your contribution would be a stretch, and the editor will see that before you do.
2. Does the page accept anything?
Plenty of pages that look like opportunities are not. A published article is not a submission page. A roundup written once in 2021 by somebody who has since left is not taking additions.
Look for the mechanism. A submissions page, a suggest-a-resource link, contributor guidelines, a form. With none of those you are asking somebody to edit a live page as a favor. Far bigger ask, and it needs a relationship you probably do not have.
3. What does it require?
This kills more rows than everything else combined, and no report can do it for you.
Directories may want membership, a fee, or credentials. Award programs have windows and eligibility rules. Podcasts want a guest with something to say and a reason to say it now. Resource pages take certain formats and not others. Contributor pages state word counts, topic lists and exclusivity terms.
Read what the page asks for and answer honestly whether you can meet it. A membership directory listing three of your competitors is telling you all three paid to join.
4. Is the site alive, and which way is it going?
A current authority figure hides the trend completely. Month-by-month link measurements show you whether a site has been rising, holding or sinking, and two years of steady decline is rarely worth your effort no matter how the numbers look today.
Check the human signals as well. When did it last publish? Are the comments or updates recent? Does the contact page still name somebody who works there?
5. How does it want to be contacted?
Sites that accept contributions almost always say how. Use the stated route and you reach whoever handles it. Go around it to an individual and you look like somebody who did not read the page.
Read the site's published contact route before you go hunting for a named person. Where there is no route and the placement justifies it, that is when you pay a verification service to find and check an individual address.
The signals that should stop you
Some pages are worth avoiding outright, and the pattern is easy to spot once you know it.
- A page listing unrelated businesses. A resource list holding a plumber, a crypto exchange and a language school was curated by nobody.
- Explicit pricing for placement presented as editorial coverage. Buy it if you want, but decide to buy it. Do not wander into it.
- No named author, no about page, no editorial standard.
- Content produced at volume with no sign of an editor.
Every one of these will accept your submission. That acceptance is the warning. How easily a site says yes and what the placement is worth run in opposite directions.
Ordering what survives
You will have fewer rows than you expected. Order them by fit, not by site size.
Your best prospects are the ones where you have something to contribute and the audience is precisely your buyer. A small specific publication read by two thousand of exactly the right people beats a large general site where your piece disappears.
Put pages that already mention you without linking at the top. The publisher chose to name you, so most of the work is done. Then pages citing competitors for reasons you can also satisfy.
What to do with the rest
Delete it. A list you already judged weak will sit there being re-read every time you open the file.
Run the search again later with a different opportunity type. That produces better rows than grinding further down a list you have already dismissed.
Qualify sites before putting them into outreach. You can then spend research and writing time on opportunities with a clear fit and a usable submission route.
See the Prospect Index, prioritizing prospects, or assessing contact availability.