Scrapebox SEO Link Building Guide: How to Build Backlinks at Scale

Link building is no easy feat.

In an ideal world, backlinks come to you naturally. Visitors find your blog post and love it so much that they share it on their social networks and even link to you on their website.

And a backlink is built– a hyperlink from someone else’s site to your own.

But in reality, that just doesn’t happen. Or it doesn’t happen as often as you’d like.

You need to deliberately get your content seen by putting it in front of people and get that visibility. In other words, to get other people to link to our website, we have to deliberately reach out to them and ask for a link back.

This manual outreach is the good old way of link building. But imagine finding one website at a time for a backlink and reaching out to each one manually.

That takes a LOT of time and is not entirely sustainable in the long run. So today, I’m going to walk you through a comprehensive tutorial to build backlinks effectively.

Today, we will learn a content scraping method using Scrapebox that will take link-building to the next level. This is one of the best ways to automate the process and bring it to scale.

Why are backlinks important?

Link-based metrics are a top-ranking factor in SEO.

A backlink is a vote of confidence on the Internet. The easiest way to check your website’s backlinks or external links with Google search console (formerly Google webmaster tools).

When an external website links to your website, that signals to Google that your site is trustworthy which is why other people are linking to it.

This concept is known as the PageRank algorithm. Developed by Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, which was also named after him.

PageRank formed the building block of Google’s ranking system and it was how Google search ranked web pages by measuring their importance based on how many backlinks a website has.

But it’s not just the quantity of backlinks that’s important, the quality of those backlinks is crucial too.

To sum up, to rank on Google we need backlinks. The no. of backlinks and the domain authority of those backlinks matter.

This tutorial will look into exactly how to find backlinks we can build to improve our domain authority. Before we get started, you will need these tools:

• Scrapebox ($97, one-time purchase)
• ScreamingFrog spider tool (Free)
• Moz account (Free)
• Buzzstream (Free trial, then $24/month)

Oh if you’re new here, I also have the following resources to help crush your SEO strategy:

• SEO Case Study: How to Rank in the First 2 Results on Google
• SEO Blueprint: How to get your first 10k visits from Google
• How to Squeeze Maximum SEO Traffic From a Blog Article
• 7 Elements of a Perfectly SEO Optimized Blog Post (+Checklist)
• Creating a Remarkable SEO Strategy from Scratch
• 13 Actionable Tips to Create A Killer Content Strategy

What is the Scrapebox web scraping tool?

Scrapebox is primarily used as a search engine scraper and automatic blog commenting tool.

We won’t be doing Scrapebox as an automatic blog comment poster because it is not effective for SEO and is spammy. (Spamming blog comments is considered a black hat SEO tactic).

Instead, we can use Scrapebox for its powerful web scraping features that can streamline many whitehat link-building tasks.

Scrapebox is a powerful SEO tool and is considered the Swiss Army Knife of SEO! It is one of the easiest ways to find many backlink targets quickly. If you don’t have a copy of Scrapebox yet, it’s only $97 for lifetime access.

Search engine harvester

You can also choose which search engines to harvest URLs.

In other words, you can scrape the search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google, Yahoo, Bing for a particular keyword or list of keywords.

Powerful proxy harvester and free proxies

Note that if you choose to do web scrapping on a regular basis, you’d need to use proxies to safely scrape. This prevents your IP address from getting banned from accessing websites or search engines.

Scrapebox has built-in proxy support which provides free proxies that you can use to safely harvest URLs.

Powerful proxy harvester

There is an additional proxy harvester included within Scrapebox that allows you to add your own custom proxy lists. It also cleans up duplicate proxies that may be found on different websites.

Start by finding potential link building opportunities relevant to your niche

Link prospects are potential websites that would link back to your site.

We will be using Scrapebox to find as many niche relevant websites on the Internet that would give us a backlink.

Once we have a list of backlink targets, we can build those backlinks in the following ways:

• Guest Posting: Publish an article on someone else’s website as a guest author, and in return get a backlink (hyperlink to your own site)
• Broken Link Building: Find web pages with broken external links and reach out to them to link to your site instead, if you have similar content to replace those dead links.
• Roundup Posts: You write a roundup of expert advice/opinions by other bloggers and reach out to them to give you a backlink for featuring their content on your site.

In this tutorial, we will be focusing on using Scraepbox to find guest post opportunities.

Step 1: Use the Scrapebox to find guest posting opportunities

Scrapebox is a very useful tool to scrape the web and find relevant guest post sites. You can do this in the ‘custom footprint’ section.

We can set up specific conditions and keywords to find backlink opportunities.

In this example, we are going to look for all the yoga blogs that accept guest authors. To do that, I’ve entered the following queries:

• “yoga” inurl:tag/guest
• “yoga” intitle:”write for us”
• “guest post” intitle:”yoga”

Click on start harvesting and in a matter of minutes, you’ll have a ton of possible guest posting opportunities. (I gathered 999 URLs from my queries!).

Step 2: Remove duplicate URLs

After you have harvested URLs, you want to refine the huge list of results and clean your list. Scrapebox will return a lot of duplicate URLs and the first thing we want to do is ‘remove duplicate URLs.

Then, ‘remove duplicate domains’. This step will probably trim down your list of URLs by 40% or more.

Step 3: Checking Page Authority on Scrapebox

This is very important because we don’t want backlinks from low page authority sites. We want strong and authoritative websites to link to our site.

When an authoritative site (e.g, Forbes, Huffington Post) links to your site, it is a HUGE boost to your link juice. It tells Google and search engines that your site is authoritative for Forbes / Huff Post to link to you.

That juicy backlink will jumpstart your SEO.

Therefore, the more backlinks and the higher the authority of those backlinks you have, the higher your own domain authority. And that is the #1 factor to improve your ranking on Google.

Now, we have to bulk check the link equity metrics of our harvested URLs using Scrapebox’s ‘Page Authority’ addon.

Link equity is the authority of a web page. Also known as page authority or domain authority, which is the authority of the entire website. The higher the page authority, the stronger the backlink.

We need the MozRank add-on, and for that, you have to sign up for a free or paid Mozscape API key. Sign up for a free account and retrieve the API key.

MozRank is a score from 1–10 which measures a URL’s link popularity.

Now the free version of Mozscape has a 10-second delay so the full crawl might take 30–50 minutes depending on how many URLs you’ve harvested.

Let Scrapebox do its thing and after it’s completed, you’ll have the page authority metrics of all your URLs — WHEEE!

Also, you can export the data in .csv format using the ‘export results as’ button.

After exporting the .csv file, you want to sort your data.

• Filter out URLs with 0 MozRank, these are likely low quality blogs

The URLs remaining would meet our minimum quality criteria — we have a total of 562 potential link prospects.

Now we just need to sift through them to find the good ones for outreach.

Step 4: Find legitimate websites using ScreamingFrog

After scraping hundreds of links, it’s unlikely that all of them will be relevant, legitimate link prospects. This is when ScreamingFrog SEO Spider tool comes in.

We want to look through the HTML pages we have scrapped earlier and search for these specific phrases:

• write for us
• contribute to our blog

To do that, we’ll set up some custom filters on ScreamingFrog.

Next, set up ScreamingFrog to ‘List’ mode. Navigate to ‘Mode’ -> ‘List’.

Final step: upload the qualified URLs from our excel sheet earlier. Now sit back and let ScreamingFrog work its magic.

After ScreamingFrog finishes processing the URLs, click on the ‘Custom’ tab to the right and you will get a list of custom filtered URLs.

The below screenshot shows 162 URLs that contain the custom filter, “write for us”. From my initial 900+URLs, I’ve filtered it down to over 162 relevant link targets — all within a few minutes.

Step 5: Gathering email addresses for link building

So now we have a nice list of 162 links we can start reaching out to. You can check out Buzzstream to gather email addresses and contact information. There is also a neat email interface in Buzzstream that can do outreach.

You’ll need to create an account to do this, but you can sign up for a free account (14-day trial) which gives you full access.

In Buzzstream, create a new project and click on ‘add websites’ button and select ‘import from csv’ option.

Now upload the 162 exported URLs list that we scrapped and filtered from ScreamingFrog into Buzzstream.

Within 10–15mins, Buzzstream will have gathered a list of contact information from your website links.

This saves you days of work combing through websites for emails. (Been there, done that. Not fun).

There you go, we are done!!

So that process will take you less than an hour. Now, we’ve gathered 160 niche-relevant link targets with all their contact info, including social media profiles and emails. #YAY!

Now we just have to use Buzzstream’s email interface for outreach and build some quality links!

Or, you can copy those emails into your email account and reach out to those prospects manually one by one. Either way, you’ve got a rich list of guest posting sites that are relevant to your niche and willing to accept guest posts.

Reach out to those sites, request a guest post, and start building your backlinks!