Do you outreach to blogs with no recent activity?

[TimShank]

I have been doing outreach to blogs with some good success. My question (problem) is that many blogs do not update regularly and they may not have a new post within the past year or so.

Is it best to pass on sending them an email or is it worth the time to do it? What is your cutoff point?

Thanks!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hey!

So what's your incentive for sending them one? If they're not going to update it, Google will also have noticed that they haven't published anything noteworthy in the last year. Also if you're only doing link building for the links and not for awareness + visits. My guess would be that it's then not worth it with a site that has not been updated.

Martijn.

[TimShank]

Thanks

Yes, the awareness is nice but the links are what I'm after.

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hey. I agree with what Martijn said that generally, you want to request links from more active sites. Those sites tend to have better overall quality, search performance, and a more active audience. The one thing I'll add is that sometimes you can find blogs that have great evergreen content (good rankings, good links, seem to have decent traffic, etc.) even though they don't have a lot of recent content. In these cases, a link to a relevant page on your site could enhance that evergreen content and sometimes site runners are willing to update old articles (even if they aren't adding anything new). For example, maybe an old blog post on a currently inactive site has a great recap of the best ways to do X (where X is a subject that hasn't changed much in years). You have a page that offers another way to do X or is somehow tightly connected, so including it in that older blog post could be of use to the people who find that old article.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Good luck! You're SEO strategy is in that case 2-5 years behind if you're doing it just for links. The rest of us have moved on to strategies that do bring company value!

[TimShank]

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with going for the link if I'm adding value to their website and making a good name for myself in the process. Even if I'm just asking for a link because I think I have something that would be of interest to their visitors I don't see a problem with it.

I appreciate that your strategy may be different than mine but I don't think that everyone has moved on from outreach for linking purposes. For example > https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building or http://backlinko.com/link-building

[TimShank]

Great tip, thanks for the idea!

[mostcg]

As you said, as long as you're adding value then there's no harm in seeking links. As always just make sure they're relevant to your space.

Link building is still a ranking factor so if you're getting a ranking increase on top of clicks and awareness why not actively seek links?