How to Find The Best Topics for Thematic Link Building on Forums with Netpeak Checker

Link building is one of the most controversial topics in SEO. The question is what links work and how they affect the positions in search results. While there is no public guide on how to get the ‘golden link’, most specialists are into PBNs (private blog networks), outreach, crowd marketing or buying links. Overusing of these ‘grey’ practices can lead to disappointing results. The easiest from techniques mentioned above is crowd marketing, or simply, putting links on the forums. Even a junior SEO specialist can cope with this task. In this article, you will discover how to find the best topics on forums using Netpeak Checker and get not only a good link but also targeted traffic.

1. What Is a Good Link from Forum?

Forums may seem quite outdated nowadays, but they are still easy to discuss a specific topic. Users can ask questions, share experience and conveniently discuss various issues. A forum can be devoted to the whole city or a particular type of knitting. Just take a look at the diversity of topics and geography of forums based on the most common phpBB platform according to SimilarTech.

At the same time, simplicity is the main forums’ drawback. There are whole combines like Xrumer, Xseon and other SEO software that create accounts, topics and put down millions of links, spamming thousands of forums. Links from such forums are unlikely to provide significant benefits to your projects.

On the other hand, there are live and moderated forums almost without spam. Search engines are loyal for such forums and sometimes can rank them above thematic portals or even Wikipedia. So links from these will positively affect your link profile. You can quickly find them and relevant topics for your projects using ‘SE Scraping’ tool in Netpeak Checker.

2. How to Find Good Forums Using Netpeak Checker?

2.1. Searching Forums in the Top of SERP

We’ll analyze tops according to the semantic core of your website. You will find only forums where you can put a link in search results. This method allows finding pages that are ranked by the needed queries. It confirms their authority in the eyes of search engines. A link from such page can be much more effective than a dozen links from regular forum pages that are just indexed. Let’s check out how to find such forums for link building with Netpeak Checker.

2.1.1. Using Keywords

Keep in mind that competitive niches include quite a few forum pages in the SERP top. Therefore, to scrape the top and find these pages you need a lot of keywords. Ten or more phrases are not enough.

You can take keywords from your semantic core, scrape or use the ready databases in Serpstat or Semrush. For example, I uploaded more than 1000 of the most frequent keywords for oz.com.ua according to the Ukrainian base in Serpstat.

2.1.2. SERP Scraping

In Netpeak Checker go to the 'SE Scraper' tool. Paste the selected keywords into the request field and configure the search engine.

If you want to scrape Google, I highly recommend using 50 good proxies in conjunction with antigate.

You can learn more about SERP scraping in this video.

2.1.3. Filtering Forums Out

To select forums among all results, you need to use filters. In my case, 3% of 147 thousand documents found in SERP were forums.

Let’s make a simple filter that selects pages with specific characters in their addresses. Here is this:

You can copy the list of these characters:

2.1.4. Processing Results

After applying the filter, you will receive forums that are ranked by the needed keywords. To identify the most useful pages and use them for link building, you need to process the results. Click on the ‘Transfer URL’ button and transfer them to the main Netpeak Checker window, where we will collect the following parameters:

• Organic keywords according to Serpstat.
• The link profile of the domain and page according to Ahrefs.

After checking, we’ve got 2766 unique forum pages, and some of them have really good characteristics.

Note. To collect the Serpstat and Ahrefs parameters you may need a paid subscription for these services. If you do not have it, then you can filter the top 10. These pages already have minimal trust and cannot only positively affect the link profile but also bring additional targeted traffic.

2.2. Searching Forums in Index

This way is about scraping forums related to your keywords in the index. We do not need to use a large semantic core to do it. It is enough to know 5-10 basic keywords of your topic. It is unlikely to find a lot of pages that are highly ranked. But this method allows you to find more thematic topics that are already in the index. This is the solution when quantity is more important than quality.

2.2.1. Preparing Keywords

To get only forum pages in search results, you need to add the inurl command to our search queries. Then the program will search documents with an URL typical for forums. We can use the same signatures that we use when filtering documents.

Queries with your keywords will look like this:

You can copy the list of these characters:

2.2.2. SERP Scraping

Add your keywords to the Netpeak Checker ‘SE Scraper’ tool and set up scraping. You can play with the ‘Date and time’ setting to get different results.

The rest of the scraping is the same as in the first method.

Note. When you use inurl command for scraping, Google is more aggressive in using captcha checking. That’s why I recommend using a lot of high-quality proxies.

2.2.3. Filtering Results

We have already limited the results using inurl command, but we still can get not only forum pages. In my practice, 15-30% of documents do not apply to forum pages.

That’s why I recommend to double-check and use the filter we applied in the first method.

2.2.4. Processing Results

Let’s process results to find the most useful pages. As in the first method, click on the ‘Transfer URL’ button and transfer them to the main Netpeak Checker window, where we will collect the following parameters:

• Organic keywords according to Serpstat.
• The link profile of the domain and page according to Ahrefs.

As a result, you will receive a list of pages that you can filter by any selected metric and determine the priority for these forum topics.

Summing up

Backlinks from thematic forums can benefit your link profile. You can easily find relevant forums for link building with Netpeak Checker. In this article, we discovered two ways how to find thematic forums. Searching forums in the top of SERP allow you to find topics that are highly ranked and can provide additional targeted traffic. Searching forums in the index allow you to find a lot of thematic topics that are already in the search engine index. You can filter results using the most appropriate metrics. In our case, we used organic keywords according to Serpstat and analyzed the link profile of the domain and page according to Ahrefs. As a result, we got a list of pages sorted by important metrics.

I hope that my article was useful for you. Feel free to ask questions in the comments below :)

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