Link Roundups: Best Practices + How To Use Them

At this point, nobody can dispute that link building is not an effective method to improve a website’s rankings in search engines. However, there are several techniques that can be leveraged to secure high-quality backlinks. The hard part is determining which technique will be most effective for your website, link building team, and niche.

One method you may not have considered is the use of link roundups.

Link roundups can help your website secure strong, authoritative backlinks while along the way build relationships with site owners, brands, and bloggers within your niche.

For this reason and more, here we:

1. define what link roundups are,
2. detail link roundup best practices,
3. and demonstrate how you can implement link roundups into your link building campaigns.

What are Link Roundups?

Link roundups are a daily, weekly, or monthly compilation of links to high-quality articles, blog posts, podcasts, or other online content related to a specific topic, theme, or category. They can be created by an individual blogger or group of enthusiasts within a niche who work together to curate a roundup.

Specifically, roundup posts have a few factors that separate them from normal blog posts. These include:

1. Link roundup posts focus predominantly on content produced by writers, bloggers, and other content creators.
2. Roundups are a reoccurring type of content that is released routinely.
3. Link roundups work to build strong relationships with other website owners.

So how can link roundups help your SEO efforts?

Link roundups are both helpful for readers and website owners or marketers, like you. They offer readers a sampling of the best content from around the web. And for company sites, roundups are a way to showcase their content, secure high-quality backlinks, and build relationships with other niche-relevant brands or journalists.

Link Roundup Best Practices

As with any link building strategy, if you are to contribute or be a part of a link building roundup, be sure it’s carried out by the books. Finding yourself involved in a link roundup that’s spammy, manipulative, or black hat is only going to get your website penalized by Google or other search engines.

With this in mind, making sure any prospective link roundup isn’t in any way nefarious is in your best interests. To help out, here are a few tips to help make sure your roundup remains white hat:

1. Ensure you aren’t a part of a roundup that may appear to search engines like link farms or PBNs. They are likely to be penalized by Google, your website included.
2. Make sure all links are high quality. The last thing you want is for people or Google to follow a bad link from a roundup you’re associated with.
3. Be sure the creator of the roundup uses best on-page SEO practices. This will help it stand out in search engines.

How to Use Link Roundups

To get the wheels in motion, here are effective methods for both finding high-quality link roundup websites or blogs and how to encourage them to link to your content.

1. Use Google Search Operators

One of the easiest ways to find quality link roundups that are relevant to your website’s niche is to use Google search operators. For those that don’t know what Google search operators are, essentially, they are a series of commands that can be used to improve the results of a Google search.

To give you an idea of the search operators that are most effective in the context of link roundups look, you might use operators and terms like:

• inurl:roundup “keyword” + “this week”
• intitle:roundup “keyword” + “best of”
• “keyword” + “link roundup”
• “keyword” + inurl:roundup
• “keyword” + intitle:roundup
• “keyword” + “monthly roundup”
• “keyword” + “monday link roundup”

Just so you know, don’t literally use the word “keyword”. Instead, use a keyword relevant to your niche. Whether that be travel, recipe, SEO, or whatever. Additionally, adding or removing the quotation marks will also deliver different results. So if you aren’t finding what you are looking for, try including or discarding them.

Also, it’s a good idea to filter for roundup blogs that are active.

To do this, click Tools and then select a relevant timeframe. Usually, between 1-3 months will do the trick.

2. Leverage Twitter and Facebook

I know it’s popular to dunk on both Twitter and Facebook, but occasionally both platforms have their uses. One of these is to find link roundups.

To do this using Twitter, head to the platform’s advanced search function and enter and search terms that are relevant to both link roundups and your niche.

There are also a ton of Facebook groups that specialize in link roundups too. To do this, simply head back to Google and use the search operator site:facebook.com link roundup.

Using this search operator in Google will deliver a bunch of relevant groups that you can join to pitch your blog and seek out link roundup posts. You can of course use Facebook’s own search function, but, in this case, Google seems to deliver more accurate results.

3. Pitch Your Content

Now that you’ve found a few niche relevant link roundups, it’s time to pull your outreach pants on.

When pitching a website for backlinks, be sure that the website is relevant to your content. Pitching an irrelevant website isn’t likely to be received well, and could even damage your relationship with the site owner or article author.

With that in mind, before pitching a website, take some time to familiarize yourself with their content. This will help you put together an email that is relevant and interesting to the person receiving the pitch.

Also, in order to get your website included in a link roundup, avoid using contact forms that some websites use. Often contact forms will lead you to pitching the wrong department or person within the company.

Wasting both your time and theirs.

Instead, you’ll need to craft a well-written email pitch to the right person. Often the blog manager, marketing manager, or, even better, the author of the link roundup article will respond best to this type of pitch. You might have to do a bit of research, but normally it isn’t too hard to find the most relevant contact information. Social media platforms are often your best bet – LinkedIn is particularly helpful here.

Okay, so in your email pitch, be sure to include the following information:

• The topic of your article or blog post
• The URL of your article
• The type of content you’ve created (e.g., listicle, infographic, etc.)
• A brief summary of your article
• Why you think your article would be a good fit for the link roundup
• Explain how including their website in your roundup would benefit both of you
• If able, provide examples of past roundups that have included similar websites

Including this information will help the site’s editor determine if your article is a good fit for their roundup. If you can, personalize your email pitch by mentioning something that you noticed on the website’s blog or social media accounts. This will help show that you took the time to learn more about the site and that you’re not just spamming them with just another generic pitch email.

One last point here, so you aren’t sending pitches to the same websites multiple times (not a good look). It’s a good idea to keep track of who you are pitching and when you are pitching them. To do this, a spreadsheet works best.

I’ll link here to a link roundup template put together by Mick from Profit Copilot. It’s a good starting point for keeping track of your pitches.

Summary

As with any link building strategy, as long as you adhere to Google’s Search Central Guidelines, link roundups remain an effective method for building high-quality backlinks to your website. To be safe, do your research and be sure that the link roundup you are pitching is of high quality.

That way, you will secure high-quality, super relevant backlinks that’ll boost your website’s rankings in the SERPs.