Building backlinks across the web is still a prime goal for many webmasters and bloggers. While the nature of link-building continues to change and its overall effectiveness has waned, the need for links on other websites remains a viable and important element of any proper content marketing and SEO-related strategy. Not only can links in the right places increase overall traffic, but they can also indicate relevance to search engines when placed on prominent websites and blogs in a given niche. With that being said, link requests can often be rejected for one reason or another. If your link request has been ignored or outright rejected, then here are the most likely reasons this has occurred.

You Don’t Know Them

While great content is an automatic prerequisite for obtaining backlinks on other websites, it is not the only important factor. Pinging links to your content via email, social media or other mediums to webmasters and bloggers who you do not know can be done easily but is rather ineffective. How would you feel if a stranger asked you to place a sign for their business on your front lawn for free? In most cases, you’d deny the request. The same is true for backlinks on the web: if somebody doesn’t know you, then they are unlikely to provide you with a link when approached out of the blue. Cultivating rapport and relationships with prospective websites in exchange for links is definitely required in a day and age in which linking back to someone can have potentially negative repercussions.

You Used the Wrong Medium

You want to make contact in a way that is most convenient for the person being contacted. Webmasters and bloggers won’t go out of their way to check or respond to messages on mediums where they are not as active, so it falls on the shoulders of you to do the proper research and determine where they are most active. By finding their most preferred medium of contact or interaction, you’ll be more likely to receive a prompt response. If you reach out through email when they prefer to use Twitter or you message them through Facebook when they are more active on Instagram, then the response time may be delayed – or they may simply not feel inspired to respond to such a request on a less than ideal medium from their perspective.

You Didn’t Sell the Benefit

There is a good chance that the person being contacted has less to gain from providing you with a backlink than you. After all, they would be contacting you if this were not the case. Because of this, first contact must be used in part to sell why partnering with you on such an endeavour is a good idea. By offering a solution to a potential problem they and their audience might have or by explaining what else is in it for them, you can increase the likelihood that they respond positively (or at all). When failing to sell the benefits to them, you can expect a negative response. This very well may be the most common reason why webmasters and bloggers will refuse to start pinging links to your website.