I didn’t build my first backlink until two years into SEO. I got tired of fiddling with on-page SEO elements and finally admitted that link building is the needle mover. Yet, link building is often cited as the most challenging aspect of SEO… let alone automating it.
Nonetheless, anything painful and tedious can be carefully studied, made into a process and automated. Automated link building once led me to 20k global readers.
How Automation Helps You Get High Quality Backlinks?
Firstly, automation reduces your hours spent on repetitive tasks like prospecting, sending outreach emails and monitoring backlinks. Secondly, automated systems can minimise human errors in data collection and analysis, ensuring more accurate results.
Thirdly, there’s scalability. The biggest of them all.
You can handle larger volumes of prospects and link building opportunities. The goal is to increase your link velocity (the rate backlinks are built) without a disproportionate increase in team size or operations.
While automation brings these advantages, it is essential to maintain a level of personalised touch. Or human inputs if you will.
For example, I come up with a pricing table on a Word document, feed it to an AI custom GPT or work project (ChatGPT or Claude) so that you can share it with your staff as a guide. My hired offshore staff uses the work project, prompts it to analyse an opportunity, and uses it to guide their negotiations with other webmasters when it comes to placement fees. This removes me from the review process.
How to Evaluate Backlink Quality
When I started off, I didn’t know anything about SEO link building and hired a so called professional link builder. He got me placed on websites that weren’t really relevant to my niche. Needless to say, I got many high quality links, invested quite a bit of money but my traffic remained pathetic. You’re better off not pitching to random sites that have guest blogging opportunities. Nonetheless, this inspired me to take SEO matters in my own hands.
Topical Relevance
How important is topical relevance?
Let’s start off with Google’s own patents.
“There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the web page granted the backlink.”
– Google Patent US20120246134A1: Detection and analysis of backlink activity.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120246134A1/en
Even from an intuitive basis, why would irrelevant sites be linking out to you? It doesn’t make sense. This is why in link building, we want to only pitch to sites whose niche is topically relevant, directly or in parallel niches.
The goal of links on the internet is to inform internet users of relevant data and research by pointing to another resource through a link. It doesn’t make sense to get a childhood education blog to link to my SEO article. Nor is it topically relevant.
This is a much healthier approach towards link building, instead of obsessing over trying to get backlinks from random sites.
Organic Traffic Quality
I use SEMrush or Ahrefs to assess metrics such as organic traffic and more. I look at their organic keywords to assess topical relevancy, and the quality of the site.
If a site is ranked for relevant keywords that are topically relevant, it is a signal that Google treats them as a quality site that is relevant to your niche.
Google has advised that links should be seen as a way to send human web traffic, and should not be seen as a way to “pass PageRank”.
When you’re reaching out to another site, simply ask yourself: will the readers and visitors of that site care about my content? If not, why should I be reaching out to guest write or earn a link from that particular site? This way, you won’t be wasting efforts pitching to sites that aren’t relevant.
You also won’t run the risk of being penalised by Google for unnaturally linking from sites that aren’t topically relevant to you.
Once again, traffic can be a vanity metric. There are sites that software like SEMrush has returned lots of traffic for, but ranked with a bunch of junk keywords, or no keywords. I know that link brokers use organic traffic as a metric, but once again, ask yourself, is it relevant traffic?
Use organic traffic, that is traffic coming from ranked keywords as an indicator, and not generic traffic.
Brand Signals
Google has signalled they are leaning more and more towards brand signals.
So here’s the “brand quality” test.
First, ask yourself what kind of content this blog or site has. Consider whether it’ll be proper from branding perspective if your article is published there. You want to evaluate if the site is well managed, and if the content is high quality and relevant. Is this the kind of site see yourself writing for?
Now… beyond content quality, look out for genuine engagement and other clear brand signals. See if they have a YouTube channel with actual subscribers. Are real people are commenting? Is their likes and following on social media platforms legitimate?
You should also assess basic UI/UX factors by scanning for constant pop ups. If a site is littered with constant pop ups, their main monetisation model may just be Google AdSense. This can be a sign of a link farm or content farm.
These are manual reviews you can train your VAs to perform.
Backlink Profile Quality
Then let’s move on to the quality of backlinks pointing to their site. Is it relevant? Is it white hat? Is their backlink profile filled with spammy Russian sites? I trained my staff to manually evaluate this, and I also use a custom GPT scoring system to guide decisions.
The same concept applies here. You can audit the quality of a site’s backlinks by looking at topical relevance and traffic.
Why Domain Authority Doesn’t Matter
These days I don’t place much emphasis on domain authority or domain rating. I place very little weight on it as it’s a metric that can be easily gamed. It’s not an official Google metric.
The more important metric is the quality of the site that you want to look at as mentioned in this article.
There are link farms out there actively selling links, with thin and poor content quality, and some nasty backlink profiles that shoot their domain authority/rating up.
How to Filter for High Quality Backlink Opportunities
Through backlink prospecting software like Ahrefs, you’ll be able to get loads of prospecting data. The key is how to filter it. First, you filter the sites you reach out to, then the sites you want to place on.
This is because you’ll be spending resources on writers to write for these sites. You want them to be of high quality.
You want to also automate this process as much as possible. To automate this process, you must first determine the factors that make up the quality of a site.
Using Majestic SEO for Topical Trust Flow
I use Majestic SEO to identify websites topically relevant to your niche, using the key metric of domain topical trust flow.
Through this metric, Majestic SEO will return you multiple scores of each “niche” they’ve categorised a site into. Some sites have 3, some have 5, 7. The key here is to look at the score. Then determine a baseline. I then manually filter the prospects through Excel and only consider prospects that are above a certain topical relevance score, that is related to my niche.
Using SEMrush and Ahrefs for Traffic Analysis
I use SEMrush or Ahrefs to assess metrics such as organic traffic and more. I look at their organic keywords to assess topical relevancy, and the quality of the site.
If a site is ranked for relevant keywords that are topically relevant, it is a signal that Google treats them as a quality site that is relevant to your niche.
How to Automate Link Building with AI
Using Custom GPTs for Backlink Scoring
Manually scoring these factors on an Excel sheet can be time consuming. You can use custom GPTs, like my pricing table to help score the quality of a backlink efficiently. This saves a LOT of time.
I trained my staff to manually evaluate backlink profiles, and I also use a custom GPT scoring system to guide decisions.
Building a Link Building Team with Virtual Assistants
The key to automating the filtering and evaluation of link opportunities is hiring and training a capable team. By hiring offshore virtual assistants (VAs) into your link building process, you can streamline your efforts and focus on high level decisions while your team handles the groundwork.
Here’s a breakdown of the roles I typically hire for to automate link building effectively:
Link Prospector Role
The link prospector’s job is to identify potential link opportunities. They are trained to use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs or Majestic SEO to find websites relevant to your niche and evaluate them based on factors like topical relevance, content quality, and quality of traffic. This role ensures you’re reaching out to the right websites from the start.
Outreach Manager Role
Once the prospects are identified, an outreach manager takes over. They handle all communications, from setting up outreach emails to managing responses in your inbox to help you negotiate for placements.
Content Writer Role
My favourite link building system is guest articles. Hence, well written guest posts are required. I hire dedicated content writers that create content tailored to the requirements of the target websites, ensuring our placements are accepted.
Hiring VAs on Upwork
I use the Upwork platform for hiring VAs as it has a good HR system, clear billing system and easy to source for qualitifed freelancers. I highly recommend it. They recently increased fees to use the platform. However, it’s still good in my eyes.
Best Tools to Automate Link Building
Hunter.io for Email Prospecting
I first use Hunter.io to locate email addresses in bulk.
Mailshake and Lemlist for Outreach
Then Mailshake and Lemlist for sending automated outreach messages. These outreach tools offer features such as drip campaigns. You can also incorporate dynamic fields in your emails to insert recipient specific details, this helps personalisation at scale.
The outreach manager then schedules follow up sequences based on recipient actions, primarily whether they’ve responded or not.
Note: To avoid spam filters and annoying the internet, we space out follow ups with at least a 5 day interval in between.
Google Sheets and VLOOKUP for Data Management
Google Sheets is the most underrated tool for staying organised when you’re trying to automate link building campaigns. If you’re managing a link building team, reaching out to thousands of prospects, it helps you keep everything in one place.
I use the VLOOKUP function in Google Sheets to pull data from a “main database.”
You’re bound to have many different databases for outreach prospects (local, skyscraper, guest posts). The same prospects may appear in multiple link prospect databases. Thus it is important to reference the same main email database. This keeps your data accurate and avoids duplication. You’ll also spend less time and money on research virtual assistants trying to clean your data.
I highly recommend learning VLOOKUP. It’s an extremely helpful Google Sheets function for SEO automation.
Zapier for Workflow Automation
Zapier is an uncanny tool to use in outreach automation. However, it’s definitely useful. I Zap all replies from my outreach tools to a Google sheet, hence making my tracking easier. I create another database for email details: deliverability data, reply dates.
You can read my recommended full list of SEO tools here.
Final Thoughts
Today in 2025/6, Google has signalled quieter weightage on links. They are looking at different factors, from reader first content, to brand signals.
Yet, link building remains a signal.
To get high quality backlinks is to build a system around it: train offshore staff and document your processes. Thoughtful automation also frees up time, letting you focus on holistic aspects of SEO. Arguably, the more you get better at agentic AI, the more AI can help handle much of the grunt work that once required virtual assistants. The potential to get high quality link opportunities has never been higher.
