The Ultimate Guide to Resource Page Link Building in 2025

Resource page link building is one of those truly timeless tactics. 

Link builders were doing it in the 90s before Google was even a thing – and even now in 2025 it’s still a very effective technique (if you can do it right).

The backlinks you can get from resource pages are often on very niche relevant, high quality sites – which will have a positive impact on your SEO.

What you may be thinking though, is why is it effective, and how exactly do you execute it for maximum effect?

That’s what we’ll cover in this article – keep reading to find out how resource pages can give your link building the edge its missing.

Understanding Resource Page Link Building

Resource page link building is about getting links on pages that have been curated, and linked out to a list of useful industry resources. This could be a compilation of useful websites, articles, tools, software or other assets that are relevant to that niche or sector.

Here’s an example of a resource page:

This example is a static page, where they have created a “Useful Links” page specifically just for sharing resources. Not all resource pages will look exactly like this, and could simply be created as a blog post, which gets updated on a regular basis.

Others may look more like a roundup post (otherwise known as a ‘listicle’), like this.

Some would class this more as a roundup post, but since it’s a large blog post and has a lot of sales industry related resources, this could simply be bundled in, and approached as a resource page as well.

You will see resource pages present in most industries in some form. Even if not exactly within your sector, there should be a crossover sector or niche, where there will be some relevant resource pages.

Why Resource Page Link Building Works?

According to a 2022 study, 24% of SEO and content marketing professionals used resource page link building as a tactic.

It not only benefits your website, because you’re securing a backlink, but often for the owner of the resource page, it benefits them, and it’s in their best interest, to keep it up-to-date –  in terms of sharing the most valuable and fresh resource for their audience. 

While some websites may not allow guest contributors, do link exchanges or accept requests for links in their blog posts – they may be more open to inserting a link in a resource page, which has been created for this purpose. 

Let’s run through some of the main benefits of resource page link building. 

#1 – Niche relevance

If you are getting links that are within your industry or related sector, it follows that it will often be very closely related to your niche as well.

It is true that resource pages often have outbound links as well (potentially there is some link equity dilution effect, but that hasn’t been proven by any study) – however, being in the vicinity of other links that are also relevant to your resource/link can give Google’s algorithm something else to grasp, in terms of determining relevance. 

#2 – Networking and relationship building

Since the owners of resource pages are generally speaking, quite open to sharing valuable content with their audience, it can also open the door to other partnerships. 

So, once you get your resource page backlink, it may not end there. 

In fact, we’ve had situations where it opened up the door to other partnerships and conversations. We’ve helped clients connect with people at local government, organizations and the education sector – because of our resource page outreach.

#3 – Link quality

This follows on from point 1, but generally speaking, resource page tactics will yield to very high quality links. 

This may not necessarily lead to links from big names or top tier media with high traffic numbers – but still highly credible links that you may not have been able to yield with other tactics. 

#4 – Referral traffic

Since it’s an established, likely to be indexed page, you can also increase your chances of it already having established traffic.  This increases the likelihood of those readers then clicking over to your website. 

Now this can be hard to measure ahead of time, and you may just need to see how it plays out in your Analytics, but when you can build a sizable number of resource page links over time, from different sub sectors, it’s definitely not a benefit to ignore. 

For example, here’s a healthcare client where they received about 60 referral traffic users, in the space of 3 months, just from the town council links.

Interestingly it even led to 5 conversions from this traffic alone.

#5 –  Increased share of the SERPs

When the resource pages or listicles you are getting links, also rank on the SERPs themselves, this can drive even more traffic through to your site as well. 

This can really help in terms of building up brand awareness, as more and more people see your brand and its resources being mentioned, and those clicks will also add over time. 

For example, even a relatively small keyword like “best email marketing resources” uncovers suitable targets we could reach out to. 

Now imagine we can compound this, by getting a placement/brand mention in all of those targets, and repeat the process for multiple groups of search terms.

For example, here’s a client who got on a listicle on Zapier – which itself, gets 5,300 visitors a month.

Now, only a small portion of this will click through to their site, but just in the last 28 days, we can see they got 41 referral clicks, and 22 conversions. Not bad from one link.

How To Build Links Using Resource Pages?

There’s quite a few different tools and techniques that agencies and link building teams use to execute a resource page link strategy (especially when it comes to finding and collecting resource pages), but we’ll cover those concepts extensively here. 

These are the same processes which have enabled us to build thousands of resource page links over the years, and have been instrumental in securing results for many of the clients in our case studies. 

Step 1 – Determine Resource Page Strategy

Before you delve into building out a resource page campaign, you’ll first want to ensure you have some kind of viable topical crossover, and an angle which will maximize your success rate. 

The best approach, is to look at your direct SERP competitors, and also larger sites in your niche (that may not be your direct competitor), to see which resource pages are in their backlink profile. 

Plug their site into your favorite SEO tool and use phrases that are associated with resource pages. For example: “useful”, “resources”, “links”.

As we can see above for this fitness-related company, they have links on pages including:

1. Exercise resources for kids
2. Online resources for fitness professionals
3. Exercise apps (this particular one is on an .edu domain)

Each of these is a seed idea for a resource page strategy. Our goal here, should be to analyze the context in which they got the link, look at the type of pages involved – and determine if it’s viable for us to replicate. 

This validation process is crucial, because there’s no point reaching out to pages which have curated exercise resources for kids – if our resources aren’t suitable for youngsters.

So for each of the link strategies you pencil up, determine what your value proposition is:

• Do you have a specific article which the audience would find useful, and isn’t already listed?
• Is your website/product/free tool itself a valuable resource worth listing?
• Do you have something similar to a resource that’s already listed but has a unique feature?

These are the types of questions you should be able to answer, to validate an idea.

This also leads us into the next step, where we can expand this further.

Step 2 – Find Resource Pages & Vet Targets

Other than the ideas you have from your competitor analysis, you also want to expand this further, and come up with novel ideas. 

The way to do this, is to take a broad-enough industry keyword, and combine it with search operators. Some of the main ones are:

• [keyword] + inurl:links
• [keyword] + inurl:resources
• [keyword] + intitle:links
• [keyword] + intitle:resources

You can also refine searches even further, if you want to specifically look for resource pages from certain types of websites for example, by tagging on operators like:

• site:.edu
• site:.gov

This is useful if you’re trying to build EDU or GOV backlinks.

Once you have compiled a list of resource page strategies, you want to then expand those strategies into actual prospecting lists. 

Take all your validated ideas that you found so far and expand them.For instance, to find resource pages aimed at fitness professionals, you may end up with searches like these:

• fitness professionals inurl:resources
• personal trainers inurl:resources
• fitness business inurl:resources

Now there are different ways to extract lists. Some methods include:

Manual prospecting:

Simply manually searching Google with these terms, and taking qualified targets that meet your criteria. You can speed this up a bit by using the free MozBar or Ahrefs toolbar, and downloading the SERP results in bulk. 

Bulk Prospecting:

If you want to speed the process up massively, you would need a tool where you can import all your searches in one-go, and then extract all the URLs.

So many different tools for this, but some include the Citation Labs Link Prospector, DataforSEO API, Netpeak Checker, or scraping tools like Apify. 

All of them achieve the same purpose  – scraping Google’s search results in bulk. Let’s use Link Prospector for this example. Our favorite way at TLG, is to use the “Custom” option. This allows us full control of the searches and operators.

Paste in all the searches you want to get a report on.

Run the report, and you’ll end up with a list of all the SERP targets.

However, to maximize the effectiveness and accuracy of the list, you also want to have an exclusion list. Link Prospector makes this easy, and has a feature specifically for this. As shown below. 

This means we can cut out all the junk, like Amazon, social media sites and very high authority sites which we don’t want in our final list.

Going back to our list, we then have the option to either extract all URLs, or to only extract unique URLs.

If we select “Only Unique” the problem is, it won’t always deduplicate out the URLs which are most suitable. So I’d advise not ticking that, and just extract all paths. 

Regardless of the tool you use, you should have a vetting phase.

No matter how many exclusions, or how refined your prospecting searches are – there needs to be some kind of human filtering taking place as well. 

As long as you have used good search operators, we will find most do meet our criteria – but in this example above, we can see a few targets where it’s just a homepage, so we can cut those targets out. 

You may even find things like blog posts that aren’t related to your topic, product/service pages, or others which don’t meet our criteria. Smart use of filters, and skimming through the list will give you a much tighter, final list. 

Link building metrics: we discuss this in more detail here, but you can also cut down your lists further by passing them through a filter for DA, DR and traffic. NetPeak Checker is really powerful if you need to leverage multiple metrics and APIs to streamline this. 

Outbound Link Probability: Specifically for resource pages, if you’re doing this in bulk – we’d recommend checking the number of outbound links, and the breakdown of those links. This is primarily for strategies where targets are very protective of their pages. If you find they are generally only linking to government sites, nonprofit organizations or their own internal resources – it won’t be worth keeping in your list. 

Categorize your list into sub batches (if required): and then research the contacts for each site. This is very nuanced, and probably not even something we’ll cover in this article – but keep in mind that resource pages can require a different approach. 

Universities and local government may have specified a department, or specific person you should contact about the page.

However, in many cases, you can just reach out to someone on the content, or marketing department. 

Step 3 – Outreach

If you’ve done a good job in Steps 1 and 2, then outreach should be on track to perform well. 

We’ll discuss this in more detail later. But some high level points to keep in mind:

• Don’t just blast out a generic email template, and ensure emails have some sort of targeted variation and personalization aspect.
• Email deliverability and bounce rates become especially important as you could be dealing with fairly large lists of prospects. So use a reliable product for validating emails like ZeroBounce, and use an email warmup tool. Instantly has email warmup as one of its features.
•  Ensure you are following good email finding practice. Tools like Hunter.io and Snov are ok, but cannot be relied on when you have to find very specific people at large institutions who handle resource pages, or when the person is not listed anywhere on the website. You may need to do a bit of manual hunting for appropriate contacts, or using a waterfall enrichment process.
• Be clear with your angle. Resource page strategies are pretty straightforward. Either you have something relevant to that page, or you don’t. But just make sure you are clear about what you found to be worthy of inclusion, and why they should link to it. Maybe its expert-backed, a unique angle, a tool that others don’t have, or whatever your reason is.

Step 4  – Process Improvement

After you have reaped the rewards (or failures) of the outreach process, you should then start to get an idea of what has worked, and where things may have gone wrong. 

Data-driven insights will come in crucial at this stage, and you’ll want to look at metrics like:

• Campaigns/strategies that had the best win rate (i.e. targets to live links.)
• The email campaigns with best response rates. 
• The campaigns with the most “Lost” targets/negative replies.
• Specific weeks or periods of the year where you built the most links.
• Industries where most of your live links came from. 

This will then act as a feedback loop, and you can see which resource page strategies you need to tweak to get a better response next time (if it’s viable), and the resource page strateges that did well, you can learn from to understand why they performed.

Crafting Your Outreach Strategy

Effective outreach strategy for resource page link building, follows a similar vein as other tactics. As we said, at the basic level, you need an email template which has a clear angle and flow – it should point at the exact page you’re trying to get on, and you should specifically explain why your resource is worth including. 

The main way we structure emails here at TLG, is to have these main 4 ingredients in our outreach emails (Let’s assume we already have a greeting, with an optional intro.)

• A descriptive/catchy/intriguing subject line.
• A hook and/or personalized line
• The main body of the email/angle
• CTA

The key thing is that even though we’re thinking of this as 4 ingredients which play their own part – the outreach email as a whole needs to flow. To the recipient, it needs to taste like one full meal rather than 4 ingredients thrown together.

Let’s dissect an example here.

1. The dad joke in the subject line is silly enough to stand out, but descriptive enough that’s relevant to the content. (i.e. avoid click-bait subject lines where the body doesn’t deliver on the promise of the subject line). Your subject line is extremely important, and if you don’t get this right, it won’t matter how good the rest of the email is.
2. Personalized line to talk about what we noticed. This is more on the generic side, but the key thing is regardless of your personalization technique, make sure its relevant enough to the angle/flow that you can transition to the next part of the email.
3. The main angle of the email (This is where your template will do the heavy lifting). We’ve been very specific about our piece and what it does, and we’ve gone a step further to give them more context about the expertise, and team behind the content. After all, resource pages are often not just there for linking to relevant content, but linking to content that is truly helpful, and with topical expertise.
4. CTA. No need to overcomplicate this. One thing to keep in mind when you’re dealing with a sector that may not be familiar with SEO/link building language, keep it as simple as possible. Terms like “backlink” may go over their head, and even small hints like “add my link” or being too pushy can be off putting. 

Extra points:

Follow ups: You should also follow a follow up sequence, and we recommend following up a maximum of 2-3 times. There’s different schools of thought on what to do here. Some may follow up with a meme, while others simply just summarize the angle of the first pitch. If you are looking to continue personalizing, then try to reference something that just happened. For example, let’s say I was reaching out with a resource about the dangers of using AI content, and Google just rolled out a content-related update – then I could reference that in the personalization of my follow up.

Broken links: Broken links can themselves act as a good ice breaker as well, just like the email below.

You can find broken links using your favorite SEO tool, or with browser plugins like Check my Links. Like the below example on a university resource page. 

If we click through, we’ll see that the site is no longer active. 

So when reaching out to the resource curator, we can reference this. This at least adds some value to our email, and we’ve helped them in some way. Will they add your link? If its relevant enough to the page and/or it’s a worthy replacement for the broken link.

Best Practices for Resource Page Link Building

Focus on relevancy

When you are creating your resource page strategies, relevancy is an obvious focus. Not simply because relevant links will have higher impact, but because for the resource curated to be willing to link to you, there has to be some topical crossover. 

If the relevancy isn’t there, or it doesn’t add value to the audience from their perspective, that batch of targets will just be a waste of time. 

However, you should also keep in mind that you also have to make it as easy as possible for the target to see the crossover. Maybe you covered a very important aspect about the topic that the other resources in the list didn’t cover. Maybe your content is backed by scientific research, or has been written by a doctor. These are the things you can clarify in the outreach pitch. Your goal should be to make it an easy “yes” for the person managing the resource page.

Broaden your idea of relevancy

While you do want to ensure you’re collecting relevant batches of resource pages, make sure you cast a wide enough net, so you have enough volume to reach out to. 

A common mistake that people make, is they take a keyword related to their industry, tag on some advanced search operators and they don’t find anything other than competitors – they then think resource page strategies are not suitable. 

In fact, you probably need to find crossover keywords (likely not a keyword you are actually targeting) and ‘niche up’ to find relevant pages. 

For instance, if we’re in the rehab sector, we wouldn’t simply search for “alcohol rehab inurl:resources”, we’d want to find crossover topics. For instance:

• mental health and wellbeing
• Bereavement advice 
• LGBTQ support

The idea here is to think about the audiences where there is going to be a crossover. In this example, we know that it crosses over with mental health issues, grief, and communities where there is a prevalence of addiction or drug use – and therefore each of these strategies open up another pool of targets to reach out to.

Harness credibility (and know your limitations)

On top of that, your company’s expertise/credibility comes into play.

We’ve found that if we approach some high-brow targets like the local government of larger cities, ivy league universities or well known charities and nonprofits, there are more hoops to go through. 

Expect these types of targets to take longer to link to you, because they have to check with another department, or go through their manager. 

Some sites may even want to have a quick phone call, or ask to speak to someone higher up in your company to just ask a few questions – so be prepared for that as well.

But some resource pages will just not link to you at all. That’s when using metrics like the ‘Outbound link probability’ come in really useful (which we talk about more here). Using this metric, you can cut out targets at the prospecting level, that just seem like it’ll be too hard to attain a link from. This ensures your resource page strategies are as efficient as possible, and link conversion rates improve. 

Assess the quality and authority

When you’re doing resource page prospecting you do still want to look at quality. That’s where we’d recommend setting a metrics benchmark for your prospecting, to cut out very small sites/blogs. Primarily because there are also a lot of very old resource pages out there, where the website has become outdated, and has probably stopped updating years ago. 

Avoid these types of resource pages, as even if they do reply – they may simply state that they stopped updating the site, and the webpage probably gets no traffic, and no visibility in Google anyway. 

You also generally want to avoid resource pages that link out to a massive number of sites, and have low authority. Even if the page does pass some link equity, that outbound link equity will be diluted by the sheer volume of outbound links. So if you get a link, it won’t really move the needle.

Add in “mini” resource pages

Not every resource page will be a standalone page. You’ll also see some articles which have a “useful resources” section at the bottom. Like this example:

You won’t always find a lot of examples like this, and in fact, you’ll mostly come across these types of articles during resource link/skyscraper tactics anyway. But, if you specifically want to find them then running searches like this will help.

• Keyword + “useful resources” -intitle:resources
• Keyword + “other resources”
• Keyword + “learn more”

Measuring Success Of Your Resource Page Link Building

1) Rankings and organic search traffic

Above all else, what impact are resource page links having on your SEO growth? You do also need time for those links to pass full link equity, but after some time, it should be having some impact. 

Like the example below, if you know you can close the link gap against competitors, and gain links on some very credible websites by using resource page link strategies – monitor the impact it has on rankings – either for the group of pages being linked to, or the overall lift (if you’re getting links to the homepage.)

2) Link building success rate

We always recommend keeping track of how your strategies are doing. If you are reaching out to a batch of resource pages, look at the number of links you were able to acquire, compared to the number of targets in that batch. 

If let’s say you’re reaching out to mental health resources and have a decent success rate (I’d say 5% or more is very positive), then double down further, and do another batch of targets of that same resource page type. 

Just analyze the successful links you got, and see what it was about your pitch, or the context of those pages which got you the link.

For example, we worked with a client in the fitness space and got some really good links in the mental health space. What we realized is that while our article was focused on strength training -it referenced scientific studies and was fact-checked by a qualified nutritionist. So, we emphasized this in our outreach next time. 

3) Authority lift

This does depend largely on how much you can scale your resource page link building, and if your business is conducive to it. 

But, aside from just the effect it has on individual pages, if it’s something you can really lean on heavily –  you will want to see the impact it’s having on your site’s overall authority (commonly measured as Domain Authority or Domain Rating.)

We had a client we started working with in around September 2020. We found out we could lean heavily on resource pages, and particularly organizations, local government, and universities. 

We built around 80 links (vast majority being resource pages), and saw a huge boost in the authority level. This increase in DR by about 16 points, equated to a 10x organic search traffic increase.

We believe the quality and perceived credibility of the linking sites (not necessarily a metric like DA or DR), were instrumental in closing the authority gap against larger competitors.

Overcoming Common Challenges: Why Your Resource Page Link-Building is not Working

Resource page link building is highly effective when done right – but it’s also quite easy to make some of the common mistakes associated with these tactics. Here’s what to watch out for. 

1. The content or resource isn’t valuable enough 

Common sense rules apply here – if you’re showing them content (or whatever asset you’re leveraging) and it isn’t up to par – then this tactic won’t work. 

So make sure:

• The content is relevant to their audience. Not just that the resource page had a keyword which seemed to overlap. 
• Have they already linked to content that is the same topic as yours. Often (not always) resource page owners won’t want to include 2 resources covering the same topic or function. 
• Is it well-written, structured well, and comprehensive enough?
• Backed up by expertise/research/credibility (i.e. satisfies EEAT)

Plus, depending on the industry they may respond differently, to different types of content. While in one industry they really want to read large guides – resource pages in another sector may want to link to an interactive tool or calculator. 

2. Not reaching out to the correct resource pages

We touched on this in the “Best Practices” section further up – but if you don’t look for the right resource pages, you’ll end up reaching out to people who just won’t link (or can’t link). 

So at the prospecting level, make sure you’re using keywords that will give you lists of targets that actually overlap with your resource from a “audience relevance” POV. It’s easy to fall into the trap of taking an industry keyword, tagging on “inurl:resources” and thinking this is all it takes. Not quite so!

You need to still look at the SERP results and make sure it’s actually giving you results that are relevant. And if it’s not, then it’s time to tweak your searches until you get better prospects.  If you don’t you’ll end up with a  situation like this email we got below. (this is someone reaching out to us with a mental health article, to include in our link building article!)

Additionally – we’ve had challenges getting links from some sectors, if we didn’t have the credibility behind the content. For example, health-related university resource pages work well if you have content that is backed by a doctor or nutritionist. But if it’s not written or fact-checked by a qualified person, then you’ll likely fall down at the first hurdle. In that scenario, you need to try reaching out to different types of resource pages that are more achievable – or using different content altogether.

3. Outreach isn’t hitting the right note

Just like you can see in the above example – while you may be using outreach templates – make sure your resource page outreach doesn’t become too templated. 

Ensure to adapt your emails to the target audience/industry, and explain with depth, why your resource is worth including. 

If you have some very particular expertise that makes your resource especially worth a read – then make sure to highlight it. If you don’t make it obvious from the outreach email they won’t know, and may not take the time to read further. 

Plus, sometimes you need to be adaptable depending on the sector. While with the SaaS sector you may want to take a humor-based approach – you may need a completely “straightforward” approach if you were approaching a teacher at an elementary school about their resource page. For them humor will just confuse them (maybe even annoy them!), and you’re better to be professional and use a simple “Link for your student page” type of subject line. 

4. You need more time

Resource page link building is notorious for requiring time. Often, the type of sites and people who are gatekeeping the inclusion of links within resource pages, will not do it right away. In fact, they often have a queue of resource inclusions and other tasks to do – and even if they reply, you’ll need to wait until they include it. Added to that, some will read the email, not reply and add it weeks or months later. 

So, maybe you just haven’t waited enough time. We would typically say, you need to do resource link building at a decent volume over a few months (at least a few hundred targets), and then you’ll see a decent amount of return in terms of backlinks. The higher the authority of the resource page (like a university or a big organization), typically the more you’ll have to wait, or the more hoops you need to jump through to get the link. 

Why TLG Could Be The Best Resource Page Link Building Agency For You

Strategic Approach

To determine the resource pages that are going to be most effective, you need a link building partner that has the ability to utilize competitor (and market) analysis to the maximum effect. 

We go beyond just scraping competitors and reaching out to the same websites. For instance, we’ve helped clients build links from organizations like the NHS, doctor surgeries and healthcare clinics – even when competitors did not have such links. This is only possible because we were able to create a custom strategy that went beyond just downloading lists from an SEO tool.

Fine-tuned Prospecting Process

We have developed prospecting techniques based on over 9 years of experience as a link building agency. 

What we have found, is that unless you’re building resource page links in a sector which is used to being approached for link inclusion, you may have to dig deeper to find the relevant person to contact. Tools like Hunter and Snov are rendered almost useless here.

if we wanted to get links from some school districts, charities or certain large industry organizations – the resource page manager wasn’t defined. But, we have in-house tools (and the know-how) to investigate who the correct person is. Even if that person isn’t listed on the website, we’ll find out who to contact..

Personalized & Nuanced Outreach

Some of the best resource page links can only be acquired with the right type of outreach technique. Personalization is part of it (which is something we’re comfortable with), but sometimes there are nuances to keep in mind. 

For instance, some larger universities have a secretary or a librarian that handles some of the resource pages. In these cases, trying to be too “cute” with your outreach, or not being clear with why you’re reaching out, will only land your email in the trash bin. Our team has the experience to know when to change our approach, and adapt our outreach according to the industry, and the type of contact.

Data-driven

Once we build resource page links, we don’t leave it there. We will analyze the strategies which yielded us the most links, and see where we can double down to get more of them. We’ll also see which resource page strategies didn’t work, but will also try to find out why they didn’t work – and improve it for next time if it should have worked. 

But above all else, it’s also about getting results. We will also use data to see where we should be pointing links for maximum returns. If that means resource pages should be done a certain way we’ll advise you. If that means focusing on tactics other than resource pages, we will also advise accordingly, and steer strategy based on that.

This is what you need from an agency. Not just what strategies are easy and going to hit quota quicker – but which make the most impact.

Over To You

Resource page link building is a very worthwhile tactic to have in your arsenal. It can lead to highly credible backlinks – not just in terms of authority, but about relevancy.

Quality, relevant links, that will then lead to relevant, quality traffic and rankings in the long run. 

It also can be a fairly nuanced tactic, and can require a lot of strategic thought, and data prospecting to get right. 

That’s where TLG can help – just reach out and schedule a call to find out more.