Somewhere on the internet there's a page that links to yours for free, and it was last updated eleven months ago by someone who has completely forgotten it exists. That page is a resource page. Finding it, qualifying it, and getting on it is one of the few link building tactics left that doesn't require a budget, a team, or a PR agency.
I've pulled 38 links from resource pages since I started tracking them properly, and lost count of how many I missed because I went after pages that were dead on arrival. Here's what actually works when you're a blogger with a modest domain and no outreach department.
Key Takeaways
- A resource page is a curated list of useful links on a topic — not a blog post, not a directory, and not a place for your sales pitch.
- Qualify before you pitch: check the last update date, whether external links still resolve, and whether the page already links to two or more of your competitors.
- Expect roughly one link for every 12 to 15 qualified emails. Anyone promising better is selling something.
- Small niche pages with modest traffic often convert better than high-authority giants, because nobody else is pitching them.
- Broken link building is the strongest entry point when you have low domain authority and nothing else to offer.
What is a resource page, and why should a blogger care?
A resource page is a standalone page — usually sitting at /resources, /links, /useful-links or /further-reading — where a site owner collects external links they consider worth sending readers to. That's the whole definition. It's curated, it's editorial, and crucially, it's usually maintained by one person who adds to it whenever they stumble on something good.
Why does this matter more for a blogger than for a SaaS company? Because the economics are different. A SaaS brand can afford to spend 40 hours on a single digital PR campaign. You can't. Resource pages reward the opposite approach: small, cheap, repeatable touches that compound.
The three types you will encounter
Not every resource page is worth your time. In practice they fall into three buckets, and only two are worth emailing.
- Actively maintained lists — updated within the last year, links resolve, the owner adds new entries. Target these first.
- Dormant but indexed pages — old, but still ranking and still receiving traffic. Worth a pitch if the page has visible authority; owners sometimes wake up when you point out a dead link.
- Abandoned and spammy — a wall of 200 outbound links with no context, no author, no update. Skip. A link here does nothing and can look manipulative.
How to tell a live page from a dead one
Three quick checks, maybe four minutes per page:
- Does the page show a "last updated" date, and is it within 18 months?
- Click four or five outbound links at random. If two or more are broken or redirect to parked domains, the page is neglected.
- Does it link to at least one site you recognise as a real competitor or peer? If the whole list is no-name directories, the owner isn't curating.
- Is there a human name attached to the site? Anonymous resource pages are almost always link farms.
I used to skip this step entirely. That cost me weeks of outreach to pages that had been frozen since a CMS migration. Now it's the first thing I do, before I even open my email client.
Finding resource pages in your niche without paid tools
You don't need an expensive backlink suite to build a decent prospect list. You need search operators and patience.
Search operators that still work
The classic combination is a topic keyword plus one of these strings:
- "intitle:resources" + your topic
- "inurl:links" + your topic
- your topic + "useful resources"
- your topic + "recommended reading"
- your topic + "helpful links"
- "further reading" + your topic
- your topic + "curated list"
Run each of these against two or three topic variations. A travel blog about slow travel in Portugal should search both "slow travel resources" and "Portugal travel links" — the surface area matters more than the precision of any single query.
The competitor mining shortcut
Here's a trick that took me embarrassingly long to figure out: take your three closest competitors and look at who links to them. Free backlink checkers will show you a slice of that data. Filter for URLs containing "resource", "links", or "recommended", and you have a ready-made prospect list of pages that already link to content like yours.
The advantage is obvious once you see it. Someone who has already decided your competitor's article is worth recommending is predisposed to say yes to a similar pitch. I've had reply rates roughly double when I prospect this way instead of starting from scratch.
What makes a resource page worth pitching
Beyond the liveness checks above, three signals tell you a page is a good target:
| Signal | Weak target | Strong target |
|---|---|---|
| Page focus | General "internet links" | Narrow topic matching your article |
| Existing links | 100+ outbound, no context | 10–30 links, each with a one-line description |
| Owner activity | No name, no contact page | Named author, active blog or newsletter |
The middle row is the one most people get wrong. A tight, well-described list of 20 links means the owner is actually curating. A wall of 200 bare URLs means they're accepting anything, which means the link is worth nothing.
Broken link building: the best entry point for small blogs
When your domain is young and you have no relationship with the page owner, you need a reason for them to act. Broken link building gives you one that doesn't depend on your authority at all.
The logic: a resource page links out to something that no longer exists — a 404, a domain for sale, a page that redirected to a generic homepage. You tell the owner, and you offer your own article as a replacement. You're doing them a favour. The framing does most of the work.
Finding broken links
Browser extensions exist that will scan a page and highlight dead outbound links in red. Install one, load your prospect page, and you'll usually spot the damage within seconds. On older resource pages, one or two broken links are common.
When you find one, check whether your content actually replaces it. If the dead link pointed to a beginner's guide to fermenting kombucha and your article is about kombucha branding, don't pitch it. False matches get ignored and burn the address.
The outreach email that gets replies
Short. Specific. No compliment sandwich. This structure has worked consistently for me:
- One sentence naming the exact page and the exact broken link.
- One sentence saying what your replacement covers, with the URL.
- One sentence offering to help if they'd rather find an alternative.
That's it. No paragraph about how you discovered their site and admire their work. Owners can smell filler from the subject line.
My reply rate on this format sits somewhere around 8 to 10 percent, and roughly a third of replies turn into a live link. Which means one link per twelve to fifteen emails. That's the honest number, and it's why volume matters less than targeting.
Turning a link into a relationship
Getting the link is the easy part. What most guides don't tell you is that the same page owner will often link to you again — if you stay on their radar.
After a link goes live, I send a one-line thank you. Nothing more. Then, six to eight months later, if I publish something genuinely relevant to their page, I'll mention it in a plain email. Not a pitch. Just a heads-up. The conversion rate on that second touch is noticeably higher than on cold outreach, because the trust already exists.
Three of my most consistent referring pages came from that second contact, not the first.
When resource page building stops working
It doesn't work forever, and it doesn't work everywhere.
If your niche is saturated — personal finance, health, marketing — the good resource pages have been pitched to death. Owners either stop responding or start charging. I watched a well-known productivity page in my space quietly move from "send me suggestions" to a paid placement model over about two years. Nothing wrong with that, but it changes the maths entirely.
The other failure mode is scale. Resource page building is a volume game with a low ceiling. Hundred emails, maybe eight links. If you need links faster than that, you'll want to combine it with something else: guest posting, original data, or a tool or template that people link to because it saves them work. A free checklist or a spreadsheet template is cheap to produce and gets picked up by resource pages almost on its own.
What separates bloggers who get links from those who don't
The ones who succeed aren't better writers or better networkers. They qualify harder and pitch narrower. Instead of "here's my article about coffee", they write "your page links to a dead espresso guide from 2019 — here's the closest thing I've found to a replacement."
Specificity is the entire game. Everything else is just email volume.
