Reviews
How to vet link building outreach lists before a UK campaign
A step by step guide to sourcing, cleaning and qualifying UK link building outreach lists, with spam checks, relevance tests and journalist contact verification.
What to take away
- Vet the list before you pitch, because a flagged domain is hard to recover.
- Score each prospect for organic traffic, topical fit, UK audience and spam signals.
- Check owner, hosting and outbound link patterns instead of trusting one authority score.
- Verify journalist contacts in the week you send, and record where the details came from.
- Write the inclusion rules down so two people clean the same export in the same way.
Where a link building outreach list should come from
Prospecting works best when it starts with competitors rather than a bought database. Export rival backlinks from Ahrefs, Semrush or Majestic, then keep domains that link to two or more competitors. Common methods include broken link building and resource page outreach. The practical detail is set out in What UK advertising rules mean for.
Manual searching still earns its place. Use Google with the site: operator plus phrases such as write for us, contributor guidelines or resources. UK journalist request services including ResponseSource and the #JournoRequest hashtag deliver live leads. Our link building services blend both routes for clients.
A link building vetting checklist for every domain
Run this checklist before any domain reaches a pitch sheet.
- Original contentdoes the site publish anything beyond guest posts?
- Named editoris there a real person, postal address and contact route?
- Link neighbourhooddoes it link out to gambling, crypto or payday loan pages?
- Footer footprintdoes the same sitewide link appear across unrelated domains?
- Hostingdoes the domain share an IP or registrar with other weak sites in the list?
- UK signalsdoes it use British spelling and reference UK places, prices and rules?
Signals to score before you pitch
| Signal | Where to check | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | Ahrefs, Semrush | Falling for several months |
| Topical fit | Five recent posts | Nothing connects to your niche |
| Spam score | Moz spam score, Semrush toxicity | High score with no manual read |
| Outbound links | Screaming Frog crawl | Sitewide links in the footer |
| UK audience | Search Console country data | Almost no UK impressions |
The table gives a fast view, but read the top rows by hand. Metrics go stale between export and pitch.
UK checks that separate real publishers from link farms
Check the site in Google with the United Kingdom country filter. A domain that never appears for its own topic in UK results is a weak prospect, whatever its authority score.
Look for .co.uk addresses, British spelling, UK prices and local references. Search Console country data or a similar audience split shows whether real UK readers arrive.
Supplier due diligence matters too. A Companies House search plus the framework in the Companies Act 2006 confirms the business behind a paid placement is registered.
Ecommerce teams scaling outreach can follow our white hat link building guide for UK ecommerce, which covers platform choices and compliance risks.
Example: cleaning a competitor export before a pitch
Say you export 4,000 rows from a competitor backlink report. Work through them in this order.
- Deduplicate by root domain so one publisher counts once.
- Remove domains with no UK organic traffic.
- Drop clusters that share a hosting IP or registrar with several other rows.
- Read the five most recent posts on each survivor and note the topic.
- Move qualifying domains to a pitch tab with an editor name and a reason to write.
Most exports shrink hard, and that is normal. A smaller clean list converts better than a large dirty one.
Verify journalist and media list contacts
Journalist contacts decay quickly. People change titles, move outlets or stop covering a beat, so check the author page and the last three bylines before sending. Our digital PR work depends on that habit.
The ICO guide to data protection explains the lawful basis, retention period and records you need when you store blogger and journalist details. Keep a suppression list for anyone who asks you to stop.
Black-hat suppliers sell scraped media lists built from spam networks. The Wikipedia article on blog spam shows the footprints that appear in paid link schemes, including keyword-stuffed comments and sitewide footer links.
Common questions
How many domains should a UK outreach list hold?
Start with fewer domains than you think. A list of 100 to 200 carefully read domains gives an outreach team enough work for a month, and every extra row adds review time.
Which spam signals remove a domain outright?
Sitewide footer links, obvious paid networks, gambling or crypto injections and no UK audience. If two of those appear together, drop the domain.
Do I need consent to email a journalist in the UK?
Journalists writing for a publication are usually treated as corporate subscribers, but the personal data you hold still falls under UK GDPR. Store the source, keep it accurate and honour opt-outs.
Should I pay a site for a guest post link?
Payment for a followed link breaks Google guidelines and should be declared as advertising under the CAP code. Buy access to an audience, not a link.
