Link Building Build Log: 95 Pitches, 0 Paid Links

01 — Starting line

20 referring domains, 1 US keyword

On 31 August 2026 DataForSEO measured spaceagency.online at 20 referring domains. 102 of the 120 referring pages were nofollow, and 100 of them were footer links from a single platform. The domain ranked organically for one US keyword.

That profile is why four waves of on-page work had multiplied impressions without moving clicks — the teardown is in our SEO Visibility Ceiling case study. The target for this programme is 45–60 referring domains within 90 days.

• The SEO Visibility Ceiling

  The diagnosis this programme answers.

02 — Assets before asks

Six things worth linking to, shipped before the first send

An outreach email is only as good as the page it points at. Before prospecting started we shipped original research, free tools and templates — pages a small-business adviser or a librarian can hand to their own audience without it reading as an ad.

• Web design pricing report

  Published agency prices, collected and normalised.

• Website cost calculator

  With an embeddable version other sites can host, attribution included.

• AI search visibility checker

  Checks whether a site can be read and cited by AI search.

• ChatGPT vs Google local results

  Original research comparing local answers across US cities.

• AI crawler access index

  Which sites allow or block AI crawlers, measured at scale.

• Free templates

  An SEO proposal template and a website RFP template.

03 — The pipeline

Every prospect is a record, every email is a human-sent draft

Prospects live in one JSON file with a status per record: ready, hold, sent, replied, declined, bounced, dead. A script builds each personalised email as a Gmail draft; a person reads it and presses send. Nothing goes out automatically.

A sync job reads the mailbox back into the file. It recognises a pitch sent outside the drafts, ignores auto-replies, and marks bounces so the single follow-up skips them. That is how we know the numbers on this page rather than estimating them.

• Competitor link gap

  Domains that cite the big national cost guides but not us — the core of the pricing-report list.

• Resource-page outreach

  Small Business Development Center pages and public-library business guides: curated, human-maintained, and relevant to a small-business audience.

• Citation outreach

  Directories and listings where a US agency is expected to appear.

• One follow-up, then stop

  One reminder per prospect. Silence after that is an answer.

04 — Filters

Most of the work is saying no

Of 195 US prospects collected, 85 sit on hold and 10 were dead on arrival. On Go Fluent's Spanish-language programme the ratio is starker: 1,254 prospects screened, 1,074 rejected. A prospect is dropped for no topical fit, no organic traffic behind a high authority score, visible link-selling signals, or no named person to write to.

05 — Week one

95 sent, 4 bounced, 7 replies

Between 23 and 26 September we sent 95 individual pitches from spaceagency.online. Four bounced. Seven people replied. Two engaged with the resource itself; five offered to sell us a link — paid insertions, a media kit of sponsored posts, a listicle slot with “positions 1 and 2 already sold”.

We declined every paid offer. The reply classification is logged, so December's report can say which list and which asset produced the conversations that turned into links.

06 — Three markets

The same machine on two other sites

On gofluentacademy.com (a Spanish- and English-language learning site) the pipeline started on 21 September: 33 pitches and 12 follow-ups sent, 10 directory submissions, built around six learning tools including a placement test and a 114-term slang dictionary. The profile needed cleanup before growth — it carried a significant share of low-quality links.

On avangardreklam.com (Türkiye) 51 sites have been pitched since 20 September around a word-order search study and three price and review indexes. Its referring-domain count rose from 27 to 31 before outreach began, but 12 of the 31 are injected spam links — so we count that site's starting point as zero.

• Strategy side of this programme (Avangard Reklam)

  The same three programmes, written up by our EMEA strategy partner.

07 — December

What the 21 December update will report

Earned, dofollow, topically relevant referring domains — not the raw total. Links per asset, so assets that earned nothing are not rebuilt. Search Console position change for linked pages and the service pages they feed.

The pass mark is written down now: if spaceagency.online is still under 30 referring domains in December, the constraint is distribution rather than content, and the plan changes.