Curated Backlink strategy as known as niche edits is one of the underrated but most powerful link building strategies.
If you want to create an insane amount of link juice to boost your organic traffic on a massive scale, then this is the best off page SEO strategy for you.
In fact, one of our clients has gained over 480% traffic and 7.9% conversion for their business.
Today we will give you an in-depth guide about how to do curated link building with proven methods.
Let’s get into the main course to get some juicy links!!

What is Curated Link
What is a curated link? In a simple sense, a Curated link is a relevant link that is placed in indexed, old content to add additional value to its audience.
In your link building campaign, a curated backlink can be your ultimate game changer. As we know backlinks are one of the most vital ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. The more backlink you will get, your website will gain authority time by time.
Not only will the link profile be improved, but a huge flow of relevant traffic will also be driven to your website which can help you to reach your website’s ultimate goal. It can be converting or collecting leads anything!!
A link profile is the makeup of links directed to your site. Google favors links from a variety of sites as well as high-authority sites. [Wordstream]
The more links added to your link profile, the score of its will be increased. As a result, you will gain much authority on a niche and Google will consider you as an authoritative site.
The key benefits of using curated link in your backlink strategy
You are placing the link on an indexed page
We all know indexing a page in google is one of the hard nuts to crack. It is still a mystery how much time it will take to index a page. Sometimes it takes only 10 minutes but in many cases, we see a period of 48 hours to get an index.
In curated link building, you don’t need to go through this mysterious process which you will need to face guest posting.
You are adding your content’s link to an already indexed page with some authority in it.
The post is already old and gaining traffic from Google
You are placing a link in an old page that has gained enough trust from Google already and is a niche authority. For the sake of authority, it gains a good amount of organic traffic.
So, basically by putting links in the post, there is a high chance you can get niche relevant traffic from that post.
The audience is relevant
Each and every piece of content is valuable if it can be represented to the right audience. I.e: “How to play with your cat” will be a valuable article for cat owners whereas dog owners will find it irrelevant.
As your link is in a relevant post to support the content with additional information, The audience is relevant and knows what you are talking about. They will find it very helpful and it will fulfill their search intent the most.
You will get niche relevant and targeted anchor backlinks
100 niche irrelevant backlinks = 10 niche relevant backlinks serve the same purpose all the time. Cause one thing Google is trying to do over the years is to serve the most relevant result possible.
When you will get a targeted anchor backlink by a curated link, it will help google to understand that you are an authority on that specific niche.
How to Choose a website for placing Curated Link
Now we will share with you a step-by-step process that is followed by us when we do a curated link building campaign for our clients.
Follow these steps and you will never need to seek any other direction for your own campaign. It will get you to your goal and you will be rewarded with some valuable backlinks.
The steps below are the steps that you need to add to your checklist to make sure the website you are choosing to place a curated link is the right one.
- Niche relevance: The website needs to be your niche. Make sure they are ranked for the keywords that are relevant to your niche. Also, check the optimization of the content and if it fulfills the search intent.
- Website’s Traffic: Targeted websites need to have at least 5000 monthly organic traffic.
- Website structure: Website architecture is important. A well-structured website helps Google crawlers to crawl easily and helps to flow the link juice to the fullest extent. So make sure your targeted website has all its contents in a well-categorized way to maintain an ideal website architecture.
- Website Age: The age of the website needs to be a minimum of 2 years old. It’s a natural fact that a 3-year-old website will get more favor from Google and the audience than a 1-year-old website.
- Minimum DR: Minimum DR needs to be 40 for your targeted website. DR stands for domain rating. It is a link profile matrix invented by Ahrefs and accepted by the vast SEO community.
Domain Rating (DR) Domain Rating (DR) shows the strength of a target website’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest. [Ahrefs] - Number and types of external links on that page: Audit the number of external links to the post that you have selected. If the post has many external links then it’s not the ideal spot to place a curated link. Because more external links mean more distraction for the audience, the possibility of gaining organic traffic will be less. Always try to select a post that has a few external links. Make that your own blue ocean. The type of external links also needs to be checked properly. If they are not relevant and do not give any value to the readers then it’s not the ideal type of external link. The goal of external links is to help users get a better understanding of a specific topic in depth.
How You need to do Curated Link Building
After choosing the right website, it’s time to execute the major part of this strategy.
You need to outreach to the webmaster. Just describe how your content can add much value to his/her content and make it more fulfilling for the audience. By offering value you are just simply showing that you have done something for them without asking.
Your outreach mail needs to be short, to the point and less fluffy. If it is hard for you to figure out how you can make a good outreach template you can check our template to get a good idea.
This is the outreach template we use at Desire Marketing.
Note: This is just a template. The subject line and the way of describing matter will not be the same for all niches.
Things not to do

- Don’t place links on irrelevant site
Sites that are not related to your niche and posts that do not relate to your topic need to be avoided.
As an example: You have a post about how to make a website on Elementor (WordPress page builder tool) but the post you are choosing discusses how to develop a website by Laravel.
Your post will not add any value at all and it’s totally irrelevant to the topic. Because WordPress is a CMS and Laravel is a web development language. So the audience will not get any kind of value from your post; as the audience are not interested in WordPress.
- Avoid sites that do something against Google’s guideline
There are some niches that are strictly prohibited by us and many SEO experts such as gambling, and pornography. These niches are in the red zone of Google’s algorithm. Gaining any kind of links from these types of sites can get you a penalty.
- Formerly penalized or site that has shadow ban should be avoided [Bonus]
From our 12 years plus experience, we saw many sites that got hidden from Google. Well, technically google won’t notify you about this penalty but you will see a sudden decrease in drooping keywords, and soon they will be lost from the top 100 positions.
If any site receives this kind of penalty, That’s not a site you should choose because 98% of the time this type of site can’t recover its former position at all.
Check this screenshot below:
Here you can clearly see, this website has over “x” amount of organic search traffic in the “y”. Then after “Z” google update it suddenly lost all traffic.
That indicates they were doing something which is not legit in terms of Google guidelines or they have some serious SEO error such as on-page gaps or technical SEO-related issues.
What should be your go-to curated link-building strategy?
Desire Marketing executes the whole curated link strategy on a different level.
We basically follow a tier-based link-building approach.
Here is the process of how we do it every single time…
The reality is getting niche-relevant links with high DR is one of the most difficult tasks in the SEO industry. You can’t guarantee that you will get links that all would be like DR 80+ or 90+.
So what do we do?
First, we analyzed our client’s website’s link demand. How many backlinks it would need to gain enough link juice for a strong push to SERP.
Let’s assume our client needs 150 backlinks to gain that push.
So we build 100 backlinks that are minimum DR 60. That’s Tier 1.
Then we would build 25 backlinks that are DR 70 and that’s tier 2.
Periodically for the rest of the amount, we would try to increase the DR as far as possible.
The benefit of these tier systems is that you can gain enough juice by putting in less effort in a short period of time.
Guest Posting vs Curated link [which one is better]

In guest posting, there are a lot of processes you need to execute. You need to invest time in researching your targeted website’s untapped topic, then there includes keyword research for that topic.
After doing keyword research there comes finding the topical gap for that keyword in the SERP. Then you need to make content that is far better than the existing content.
But if your only link building strategy is guest posting then it’s like playing a gamble with yourself. Because sometimes even if you have some top notch content in your inventory, many websites will charge an amount of money from you for posting on their blog.
So as a matter of fact, Guest posting is a huge investment of time and money in the long run.
On the other hand with a Curated link building strategy, the time you are investing is not so much and you are placing links in an aged, established post where the webmaster will appreciate your post as it’s going to add value to their content and make it a square one.
So Curated link building saves your time, effort, and money to a greater extent.
Verdict
So from above, we can say-
- Curated backlink strategy is more powerful than guest posting.
- With the right strategy and tactics, you can earn some powerful backlinks for your website and grow some good organic traffic.
- For low budget link building planning, Curated backlink strategy is the best choice. It saves a lot of time and you can target multiple websites at a time to build links.
- Follow our tier basis link building techniques to make sure your campaign gets the best result.