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Can outreaching for link building be called spam? (7)

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There's this technique of link building where one reaches out to bloggers/websites in the same niche and ask them for a link pointing to your blog post. Manually doing this isn't feasible, so the "procedure" is to use an email finder and then use a software like mailshake or lemlist to send lots of emails and wait for them to respond. Then take things to the next level after a response. Will this count as spam in Europe or North America? I searched a bit and it's considered pure white-hat method of link-building with little of no chances of a Google penalty despite any future updates over the years.
Appreciate your thoughts on this.

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Well, this is kinda borderline IMO.

On one hand, it's kinda normal and widely accepted to contact owners of sites in order to start some kind of cooperation, on the other hand, scrapping emails and automatically sending emails to them is spamming.

The emailing itself is not likely to cause a penalty, but links from penalized sites wont do you any good. In the best case, they will be ignored by the algo.

I'd definitely advice to choose the linking partners wisely and only ask for link exchanges with sites that can actually benefit your link structure.

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If it is done properly (meaning you have something of interest to offer to the person you contact), it won't be perceived as spam. Unfortunately, when doing link building, you often don't bring any value. I even had a casino SEO agency hitting one of my contact forms every 5 minutes with a bot, when I told them I had no interest in linking to their website... (talk about spam)

Have a look at Alex Berman's approach for outreach. He does it for leadgen, but you may find some interesting ideas. Especially on how to warm up a domain before sending campaings, how to avoid being marked as spam...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAr...c1WCpIz3YAJQeQ
(I have his Email10k training and it won't serve you for this purpose)

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I understand, but in this case, one does not need to hide their ass and waste energy to stay safe from the "spammer" label. I checked many famous bloggers use this technique to get backlinks and it's considered one of the "safest" and durable forms of white-hat link building.
Of course, why would one choose a bad website to link with?! Especially when the purpose is to link with the right kind of people to promote your contents and grow with them. And one can be very choosy here with potential partners.

I don't know where exactly to put it... white hat, black hat or borderline... If one does it manually and sends 20- 25 emails a day and 8 hours of effort it would still count as spam. Autmoting the process would take a few minutes and a thousand emails and would still be the SAME LABEL - SPAM.

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I can imagine it will be challenging at the beginning and may take a month or two to get the first few links. But then it can get easier as time passes and we can branch out to other techniques like press releases and guest posting.
And thank you for sharing the link... Will check it out.

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Nope it's not the same

If you spend the time and actually try to contact people who have good sites, relevant to what you are doing and you write a personalized email to them... it's hardly spam, but rather a legit approach at getting in touch with possible future business partners.

But if you setup a crawler that will grab thousands of email addresses and then email to all of them: there will be a ton of unrelated sites, you will grab emails that are meant to serve customers, sometimes you will grab multiple emails from the same person or even the same domain, lot's of those emails will be dead or bogus... the list will be messy, you will send multiple emails to the same person, lots will bounce.

I really wouldn't compare these two approaches.

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Not in a position to comment now. But will update you here in 2 to 4 months.

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