Month: September 2024

Link building, I’ve always said, is an art.

Sure, you can learn every link building trick in the book, spend hours, days and months executing and perfecting strategies and get a decent return on every dollar you’ve ever spent on building links – but that’s only half the story.

We’ve done many posts on our blog discussing in great details the subtle nuances of link building (including many off-the-map but purely white hat, advanced link building techniques).

But, as far as real life, actual, hands-on link building goes, many people fail to get past a big question:  Where the f**k should I start? Where’s my starting point? 

You’ll get a variety of answers to this depending on who you ask. But if you ask me, resource page link building is one heck of a good starting point to test the waters, learn the ropes and actually start getting a positive return on your link building investment.

If that’s got you excited and you know how hard some of the link building strategies can be, you’re going to want to bookmark this resource page link building guide.

Trust me, just going through these steps will add a definite edge to your link building campaigns and have an immediate effect on your ROIs.

What Are Resource Pages? (Resource Page Definition)

Old school link building methods are coming back full circle.

Before getting into the thick of things (and before making the whole deal slightly complicated), let’s understand what a resource page is.

In the simplest of words – and as the name itself suggests – a resource page is a page that collects, curates and compiles helpful resources.

More often than not, resource pages are found on niche specific websites that also happen to be authority sources of information on their own. So, when they recommend a certain page as a valuable, helpful resource, it not only “sells” the quality to their readers, but also sends incredibly powerful SEO signals to Google (read more about on page and off page SEO here).

In essence, good resource pages check all the link building boxes – relevancy, authority and context.

Simple enough, right?

It definitely is.

But this is where things get interesting.

When we talk about resource page link building, we aren’t AT ALL referring to  shady, dubious and spammy pages   that do nothing but put a bunch of links together. The reason I’m forced to explicitly mention this is because the majority of resource pages out there fall into this category. The genuinely high-quality resource pages aren’t easy to come by, and that’s where resource page link building draws its value from.

A good resource page will never try to sell you anything. If it does, it’s (usually) not worth your time or energy. Many great resource pages rely solely on the feedback from their readers – a great indicator of quality.

This resource page by The Black Perspective is a great example of this:

Moving on.

 

Look At This Resource Page Example:

Neat, clean and to-the-point. There’s no junk on the page – only genuine, helpful resources that users are guaranteed to appreciate.

 

Here’s Another Good Resource Page Example (Link Pages Example)

Here’s a great example of what a good resource page looks like. It’s clean, well designed, comes from an authority website and hosts links that are definitely worth clicking on for the user.

Important Good resources do not usually feature obviously paid promotions.

 

Why Do Resource Pages Exist? What’s the Point, Really?

Google is smarter than ever; the search results are extremely personalized and we all can find whatever we want with a couple of clicks – even without the help of resource pages.

But that only paints half the picture.

Resource pages are needed to make life simpler for those who are heavily invested in a particular niche (simpler even than what Google does). If you are a paleo diet follower, you only need to land at the right paleo resource page to instantly have access to all the trustworthy (the important word here) content. There’s enormous value attached with anything and everything that can save us time – and resource pages certainly do that.

In other words, resource pages (and all other link pages) are here to save us a few clicks and a few minutes (a precious thing, given our deteriorating collective attention span). More importantly, they shield you from all the noise and point you in the right direction.

 

Why Resource Page Link Building Works And Why It’s Still Relevant in 2020

Believe it or not, we’re almost there. 2020 is here.

While we may not have (yet) succeeded in hitting some of the goals we set for ourselves (this one, for example, is hurting us all in real time), we can finally say that link building has evolved beyond recognition.

I started building links a few years ago (back when EVERYTHING was fair game, from bulk links from Chinese domains to anchor text spamming). Today, none of it makes sense. So, the question is this – are resource pages still relevant in 2020?

I’d say yes, 100%. But this obviously only applies to good resource pages.

The reason is simple – good resource pages add value to search results. Google loves nothing else more.

I say this because I have been an active part of the changing link building and SEO landscape over the last few years – from being a mere enthusiast to founding a cutting-edge link building agency. At Ghost Marketing, we customize each and every aspect of a link building campaign to suit your exact requirements. To know more about how we do it, do go through our link building process. You can also get in touch with us here for a free link building proposal.

 

Why Resource Page Link Building Works

There are no gimmicks involved. More often than not, good resource pages rely solely on good content. No money changes hands, leaving the spammers at bay.

 

It doesn’t matter what niche you operate in, you’re always going to find good websites that build resource pages relevant to what you do. In comparison to other link building tactics, resource page link building is more scalable. The bigger and more lucrative your industry is, the easier it is to find resource page opportunities.

 

Building links via resource pages is a proven gamechanger. We, at Ghost Marketing, do it ALL the time. We know how to find pages, how to create content that is valuable to these pages and how to close leads at a  massive success rate .

So, if you’re a link building agency, it’s absolutely worth your time to boost your overall link building ROI this way.

I wouldn’t want to disclose our trade secrets, but it’s enough to say that a good chunk of links (depending on the industry the client operates in) we build does come from extremely high quality resource pages. This add immense value to the page itself, while directing all the link and domain legacy our way. A win-win deal! 

 

Resource Page Link Building – A Complete Guide

A quick Google search and you’ll find dozens of resource page link building guides. The reason I still decided go ahead with this post is simple: none of the other guides discuss the practicality of the process. To counter that, I will try to talk about how to go about each and every step of the actual link building process (and, more importantly, how to identify the red flags).

In this post, we will keep the discussion limited to how resource link building actually works. The more technical aspects (scraping and automating the process) will be discussed in a future post. Subscribe to our link building blog here and follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop.

 

How To Find Resource Page Link Building Opportunities

We’ve already discussed a number of link building tactics in brief. If you’ve gone through those, you’d have noticed that the first step is – regardless of the method being followed – is finding link building opportunities that are extremely likely to yield success.

Building a successful link building plan is, in other words, all about continually steering the ship in the right direction. 

This means maintaining a strict and practical ratio when you build your list of prospects. We all would love to have tons of links from .gov and .edu websites, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. So,  maintain a workable ratio and you’ll get results that do justice to your investment  .

 

1. Run A Quick, Superficial Search

Before you get down to the nitty gritty details of resource pages link building, take stock of what’s in store for you using a simple, quick Google search. It should take no longer than a couple of minutes to understand the kind of resource page landscape you’ll be dealing with in regard with your (or your client’s) industry.

We will take “meditation” as an example. This is one of the hottest industries “in vogue” these days. Business have a lot to offer in this segment: from merchandise to equipment and software/apps.

We will run a Google search or “meditation resource pages” and see what turns up.

As you can see, we have already found top ranked resource pages in our niche. If you’ve got Ahrefs’s Chrome extension installed (I highly recommend Ahrefs for every link building agency), you will also see that most of these pages belong to websites that have a good domain rating.

 

 

2. Find Resource Pages Using Google Search Operators

The next step to dig a little deeper – scalpel level precision.

Essentially, we want to now weed out ALL the noise and find resource pages link building opportunities that are   extremely likely to convert  . In other words, this is the step that will do us a world of good (in terms of efforts and ROI), when executed properly.

There are a number of Google Search operators and modifiers you can use for this process. Most commonly, we go ahead with the assumption that most resource pages follow a certain methodology:

• Resource pages are likely to have the following words in the title and/or the URL:
  • Resources
  • Helpful resources
  • Links
  • Helpful links
  • Useful links
  • Useful resources
• They will also, at times, be downloadable files (for example, PDF files and Excel sheets). We want to stay away from those.

Based on this assumption, we can use Google search operators to fine tune our progress.

• Keyword +  intitle:resources 
• Keyword +  inurl:links 
• Keyword +  intitle:resources inurl:links 
• Keyword +  intitle:resource inurl:link -inurl:pdf 

And so on. There’s no limit to the amount of fine tuning you want. Just remember that the more operators you add, the stricter the search will be. So, you would want to keep things fairly broad, otherwise you’ll end up with no results at all. (Again, this is something that depends entirely on your niche).

This is just the start but if you feel overwhelmed with the amount of SERP results this step returns, I completely understand. Just get in touch with us here and we will draw up a free, fully customized and no-obligation proposal for our resource page link building service.

 

Example

Here’s what such a fine-tuned search result looks like for our example.

If you want to keep the search limited to a certain location, you can add another modifier. For example, if I want to find out UK specific pages, I will tweak the search slightly by adding the operators site:.co.uk and site:.uk

Similarly, if I want to create a very specific list of high authority university/school and government website prospects, I will run the following command:

If you understand the logic behind each operator, there’s no need to sweat over the details. You will get the hang of it as you go, I’m sure.

 

Ghost Marketing Resource Page Finder Tool – Free Download

As long as you’re not working with hundreds of keywords, it’s possible to automate much of your resource page hunt using nothing more than a simple spreadsheet.

For those who don’t have access to advanced tools and paid programs, I have created a quick-fix resource page finder tool.

Figuring it out shouldn’t be a hassle. It’s straightforward and self-explanatory. It takes your keywords and returns clickable Google search links that you can scrape using your favourite scraping tool.

Click on the box below to make a copy of this free resource page finder tool for yourself.

 

Condense All The SERP Links Into A Master Document

I have already talked about this briefly earlier.

It’s important to bring us back here because this will, for what it’s worth, be your master list of prospects – your link building bottleneck.

The better it is in terms of quality, the easier it will be to go about the outreach stage. More importantly, being careful here will leave you with a lead-rich list of prospects.

Remember the first rule of gold mining – there’s a little bit of gold everywhere, but a good prospector only goes for the tract that’s worth their time.

 

Identifying Spam Resource Pages And Staying A Million Miles Away From Them

If you’re running a business website (or any website that’s designed to bring in revenue), there’s absolutely no way you should have any – even a distant – association with spam websites.

This is the same reason why we go to extreme lengths to disavow bad links.

The bad part about link pages and resource pages is that you’re very likely to somehow have more bad apples in your bag of prospects than you’d anticipate.

But it’s not too difficult to identify spammy resource pages.

Here are a few pointers I go by when scanning resource pages for a client:

 

The Look

Spam resource pages usually have a TERRIBLY bad UX. No consistency, 1995 coding and zero thought given to the user’s comfort – you name it and they’ve got it.

 

Too Much Junk

There’s no order. You’ll find anything and everything – from content that doesn’t belong to the industry and a host of annoying pop-ups, pop-unders, banner ads from god-knows-what ad serving agencies.

 

Suspicious Domains And Backlinks

It explains itself. More about this can be read in our comprehensive link audit guide.

 

Spam Score

When you have hundreds of prospects in your master sheet, it’ll obviously be impossible to run manual checks on all of them. You can make things a bit easier by running a spam score analysis.

Moz, for example, has a handy tool that lets you check domains for spam (Ahrefs doesn’t have such a tool, as far as I know).

 

Resource Pages Link Building – The Outreach

As is the case with most other link building strategies, resource page link building relies heavily on email outreach – from digital PR to networking.

Since this isn’t the place to talk about the finer details of email outreach, I’ll just note a few important points.

Link building outreach is a whole different ballgame. The average, run-of-the-mill email strategies just don’t work here because good websites have good webmasters, and they know what you’re up to. If you’re looking to scale up your link building campaign to develop an organic, well-rounded link profile (with great returns on your money), do check out our link building process. If you want to request a free proposal, contact us here and I will personally make sure that you hear back from our team ASAP.

 

Matching Your Content With The Opportunities

One way to really scale up your resource page link building campaign is to find opportunities that already align with your top quality content.

This will save you a lot of time, trust me.

Going back to our example, if I have a popular page titled “Why Every Workplace Needs A Meditation Counsellor”, I will take a few minutes out of my schedule to find resource pages that discuss meditation from the mental health/workplace stress angles.

 That, right there, improves my eventual link building ROI even before I’ve sent an email! 

 

Creating Content That Fills Resource Page Content Gaps

This method is best saved only for high DR resource pages.

There are thousands of resource pages out there that are hungry for extraordinary content.

Why?

Because it improves the quality of their own pages!

So, you can find out premium, top-of-the-line opportunities by identifying and filling content gaps.

Let’s go back to the earlier example. Let’s say we find a resource page with high DR and organic traffic. The page we’re interested in lists meditation resources for kids. We scan the links it hosts and quickly find that there’s no resource available that discusses meditation tips for children and young adults.

You can take your time to create a short (but useful) guide and then approach the webmaster. Needless to say, every content piece you create will find a for itself in multiple campaigns, paying for itself in no time.

When it comes to creating content, it pays to have a result oriented system in place. The whole point to make sure that every piece of content you create keeps adding value to your website in terms of backlinks, organic traffic, leads, conversions and overall SEO. Do take a moment to learn how our link building process integrates content marketing into every campaign to keep everyone involved on the same page.

 

Resource Page Link Building + Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of the most cost effective ways of building high quality links.

It’s definitely possible to combine it with resource pages to find easy-to-score link building opportunities.

Here’s how:

 

1. Scan Your Prospects For Broken Links

Websites disappear. Pages go AWOL. URLs go haywire. It happens all the time.

So, you’re always likely to find broken links on resource pages.

You can scan your prospects for outgoing broken links using Ahrefs (or your favourite link building tool).

 

2. Create/Plug Content

If you find broken resource links that already align with your content, that’s great. If not, create content that would ideally be better than the quality of the broken page (you can use archive.org to find cached versions of broken pages).

 

Find The Right Balance And Resource Pages Will Massively Improve The Link Profile

It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it for your own website or handling the link building campaign for a large business, resource page link building eventually boils down to how well you maintain the balance – in building the list of prospects, in reaching out and in optimizing your content.

When you do get it right, resource pages have the potential to improve the link profile for your website by leaps and bounds. It’s a treasure trove of opportunities – you just need to find the right ones!

At Ghost Marketing, leading link building agency in the UK, we’ve built, run and managed link building campaigns for businesses around the world. High quality links, industry leading success rates and impressive returns on every single dollar you invest – we make it a reality.

Get in touch with us today to request a free, fully customized link building proposal.