Quick Summary: Link prospecting is a filtering discipline: build a wide raw list, cut it hard with type and traffic filters, then verify the survivors by hand. In our campaigns 40-80% of raw domains fail before manual review even starts, which is why the funnel below spends most of its effort on rejection, not discovery.
In this article
- Step 1: build the raw list wide
- Step 2: cut it hard, automatically
- Step 3: verify the survivors by hand
- Step 4: track decisions like an asset
Every bad link in every audit started as a prospect somebody approved. That is the real stake of link prospecting: the quality ceiling of your entire campaign is set before the first email is sent. This is the exact funnel we run on client campaigns, with the same thresholds.
Step 1: build the raw list wide
Start from three sources and merge them. Competitors’ referring domains show you who links in your niche at all; SERP results for your target queries show who ranks and therefore who editors already trust; and niche-specific footprints (roundups, resource pages, industry publications) catch sites the first two miss. Width is a virtue here, because the next step is designed to destroy most of it.
Step 2: cut it hard, automatically
Before any human looks at the list, filters remove what can be removed mechanically: site types that never yield editorial links (ecommerce, directories, corporate brochure sites, local businesses), domains outside a sane DR and traffic window, and languages you do not target. Classification is the workhorse: our website classification process tags every domain by type and niche so the cuts happen in minutes, and the reasoning behind cutting most of a list before review is documented in how we cut 80% of irrelevant websites before outreach.
Step 3: verify the survivors by hand
What survives gets the expensive treatment: a person in Ahrefs checking the traffic trend (growing, stable, or sliding off a cliff), traffic geography against your markets, whether top pages match the site’s supposed topic, the outbound-link pattern (a site linking to casinos, crypto, and payday loans at once is monetizing, not editing), and whether recently published content actually enters Google’s index. The full criteria are public: how we evaluate whether a website is worth outreach.
Step 4: track decisions like an asset
Every accept and reject, with its reason, goes into the campaign log. Rejections save future hours (a site rejected for fake traffic stays rejected), accepts become relationship history, and the log itself is what lets a client audit why every link exists. Prospecting done this way feeds directly into our outreach link building service, where the shortlist goes to you for approval before a single pitch is sent.
Tell us your niche and we will send a sample of vetted prospects, with the data behind every accept.
Get a link planFrequently asked questions
Link prospecting is the process of finding and qualifying websites worth pitching for a backlink: building a raw list of candidates, filtering out the junk, and verifying that what remains has real traffic, editorial standards, and topical fit.
In our campaigns, 40-80% of domains fail qualification before manual review even begins, and manual review removes more. A raw list of 500 domains typically yields well under a hundred genuinely pitchable sites.
Organic traffic and its trend, where that traffic comes from geographically, whether the site’s top pages match its supposed topic, its outbound-link behavior, and whether new content still gets indexed. DR is the weakest of the common signals on its own.
One serious index (we use Ahrefs), a way to classify sites by type and niche at scale, and a spreadsheet discipline for tracking decisions. Everything else, including contact discovery, comes after qualification, not before.
