Japanese Link Building Outreach – How to acquire backlinks from Japanse sites

We all know that the link building outreach is essential for your digital presence success, which is no different in the Japanese market.

This article will walk you through some of the characteristics and essential differences in the Japanese link building outreach process, followed by how I do the Japanese link building outreach here in Japan.

Why Japanese link building outreach is challenging?

If you have any experience with outreaching Japanese sites for any types of links, you might be gone through a low rate of response and difficulties already.

Most of the necessary link building process used in English culture can be applied and crucial in Japanese link building since we all share the same fundamental Google ranking algorithm. However, there is essential uniqueness in linking building outreach to Japanese sites.

Here are the main reasons why it is more challenging than reaching out to English (or other languages) sites.

Communication Barrier From the Language and Culture

The communication barrier is probably the best and most prominent reason why so many people have a hard time outreach and acquire links from Japanese sites.

The language is different, but the severe business cultural gaps make it harder to communicate and negotiate.

English is not too commonly used in Japan. Not too many people speak compared to other countries. More importantly, approaching and negotiating something like link building is fundamentally different from other Western countries.

You will have a disappointedly low rate of replies with English email since this just another spam mail as they are getting much spam like this. Also, Google’s English translation sounds like a machine, and people still sound it spam, unfortunately.

Moreover, the way people ask for something or do business is very and very different in Japan. The famous “Hi, I love your post very much! wondering if you can check out our ~” never work.

It would be best to have a native and professional Japanese link builder who understands language and culture to maximize your time and efforts.

The guest post is not that popular in Japan

One of the most commonly used link building technique, the guest post, is not popular here in Japan, especially if it’s for link building purpose.

There is some prestigious new or opinion media site that is continuously looking for guest writers or guest post (in Japanese “寄稿 – kikou”)). Still, it is usually for someone famous in their markets or industry leaders.

To be a guest writer in Japan, you have to know the status or famous name or gain a fair amount of trust as the writer.

Yours randomly asked site owners likely to have no idea what is a guest post is unless they are used to it, and they probably do not understand how it even works.

Therefore, if you want to build links using the guest post outreach from the Japanese website, you might first educate how the guest post works first and negotiate.

Very hard to find the email address for outreaching

When searching a Japanese website or blog, you probably find it harder to see an email address to contact, even using some tools like hunter.io.

Japanese webmaster tends not to disclose their email address on their websites, mostly privately owned, because privacy matters or does not want to get spam. Even though they do, they do something like “contact{}gmail.com *please insert @ in {}” so that machine cannot scrape their address automatically.

Instead, the form is commonly used in Japanese sites to contact, and most of the form has the reCAPTCHA.

Therefore, if you would like to reach out to a fair number of Japanese site owners, you cannot use site outreach software to correct email address from the site, but you have to manually go into the sites and find contact information or forms to reach out.

(Bonus Tip) Are you offering Paypal?

I would not recommend offering Paypal transactions for people who are offering some financial rewards for such collaboration.

People here in Japan use Paypal for sure, but not commonly used. Due to the Japanese policy, the user has to go through bothersome manual identity authorization to open up new accounts. Thus, relatively few people do not even have accounts, let alone getting paid in non-Japanese currency cost so much exchange fee.

Rather than using Paypal, I recommend using the method commonly used for Japanese people to increase the success rate, like the local bank transfer, Amazon gift card, or some local payment service like Linepay or Merpay.

Some facts about the Japanese link building outreach

I have worked with some statistics using our database of millions of outreach attempts, and over 1000+ contacted and replied site or webmasters, and here are the interesting facts about doing link building outreach in Japan.

Average Japanese link building outreach response rate in Japan

I have heard that the general link building outreach response rate to the English site was about 8~10%. However, even I crafted my pitch skillfully, or even will attractive offers; I usually landed around 3 ~ 5% as I keep doing outreach.

Although this number is very different if I divided the type of webmaster between corporate and private one, the private-owned site tends to have a much higher response rate than the corporate-owned site. While a private-owned site has around 6.56% response rate, similar to the English site average, the corporate-owned site has a much lower response rate of 2.82%. Therefore, if you think of acquiring links with a more efficient budget and timeline, I would recommend the only target to a privately owned website. You can usually tell from looking at the sites because if a company owns the sites, they typically put their corporate name.

However, it is just the overall statistics with average, and rate can be very different by industry and contents that you want to link into; also, the contact information of privately owned sites tends to be hard to find.

Site Ownership Types	Average Link Building Outreach Response Rate
Owned by private individual	6.56%
Owned by corporation	2.82%
All	4.92%

Average cost and Japanese link building outreach by topics

Some sites cost to acquire links from, and this is no different in Japanese outreach. Although this cost varies a lot by the owners and types of the link, I have calculated some stats to give the ballpark, using our 1000+ already contacted list. I also figured this average by the kind of topics it links to. This gives you the general price of the backlink building in Japan, whatever the topics you want to get a link from.

Topics	Average Price (USD)
Gadgets / Fashion	26.75
IT Softweare / Services	58.50
Real Estate	260.00
Finance	426.00
Game	450.00
Others	241.50
All	221.55

The total average cost for the link building is about 300 US dollars so far, but it looks very different depending on the topic you are targeting and linking to. Generally, the high-tech gadgets or fashion goods tend to very low; they are sometimes happy with only free sample products.

However, the price gets pretty expensive when it’s getting too Finance or Game topics. Even the average was above range; I have seen many cases that ask for over 1K US dollar or a constant monthly payment fee.

These prices also very different by the DA (or other site metrics like traffic, CF, TF), and as you may already know, the higher these metrics are, the more expensive to negotiate with.

How we do Japanese link building outreach into Japanese website

Having said Japanese link building outreach is different and challenging, I will introduce you step by step to how we conduct link building outreach in Japanese and how we help clients get more backlinks from a Japanese site.

Step 1: Generate the GREATE contents to link to

Generating excellent content is no different from other language link building; the contents are crucial and vital. However, there are little by various aspects you should keep in mind when it comes to Japanese link building outreach.

First, the famous link building contents infographic does not work here in Japan. The infographic is not typical in Japan, so people do not value it too much.

Second, the contents have to be fair and well written in Japanese. I have seen too many Google-translated or poorly translated content for the site. No Japanese want to link to such a site or page, or they do not trust such sites.

This is also the same for the guest post. Do not just translate English articles into Japanese; people can tell quickly. The quality is crucial, and you may want to get a native Japanese content creator rather than just translate with machine or non-Japanese.

I cannot emphasize enough this; the contents’ quality is vital for your successful link building outreach. You saw all the cars or electronics the Japanese build in the past; we tend to be very detailed and care about tiny things.

From my experience, well written and analyzed contents about some survey, research finding, ranking or other resource types of contents worked well compared to other contents, same thing in a guest post to, the well-analyzed research type of article from industry professional tends to get the higher chance being post.

Step 2: Setting stragety and requirements

I think this step is not too much different from the usual link building outreach campaign. We analyze the current anchor test distribution to find good anchor text. We also should set some requirements of the sites we are reaching to, such as DA, traffic volume, Trust Flow, or Citation Flow.

We also decide what type of links we want to place, depending on the topics and contents. These types of backlinks are detailed below section.

At this point, we usually craft the general template for the pitch we will use to contact someone for the first time. Of course, the spamming exact same template to everyone is not a good idea, but to have some structure of the pitch and general line with the offer are useful to make the campaign time-efficient and keep the outreach quality consistent over time.

We have tried many types of outreach pitch and has been (and being) update those with AB tests to have the working pitch for getting the higher response rate.

Step 3: Targeting and research list-up the right sites

Using the requirement and strategy we build in the previous step, we start creating the site’s lists to contact, which makes the link building outreach campaign efficient.

We have utilized some conventional tools like Ahref, Moz, or Buzzsumo to list the target, but most of this research process has been done by the manual process by using Google search operators in SERP in Japanese.

By this time, we already have some excellent ideas of what kind of keywords or brands name we should go after by research current anchor text, relative keyword research, and keywords from competitors.

As I describe below section, if we are going after the competitor’s backlink, we also list up the potential competitor sites and list all the backlinks they are getting from.

Step 4: Setting up the email and contact accounts

I generally recommend using original domain email accounts from our experience with Japanese backlink outreach campaigns in the past. It can be something like japan@domain.com or some Japanese person name like taro.suzuki@domain.com.

I experienced a slightly better response rate using original domain email than using free Gmail accounts, but it does not mean Gmail does not work.

If I am using a Gmail account or original domain with GSuite, I recommend having Japanese female pictures in the profile picture. You can get AI-generated Copywrite free Japanese female face from service like 写真AC.

They are no science behind it, but I tend to get a better response by doing so.

Also, for some site which does not respond even with couple followups, or site which does not even has an email address or contact information, most of the site owner has it’s own writers Twitter accounts.

I explained in this article that among the most Twitter used counties, Japan is number two. Everyone has Twitter accounts.

Related article: Top Japanese Social Media Apps: Demographics of 7 Major Apps in 2020

And sometimes, DM from Twitter gets to deliver well to the writer, and we even see the read status of them. Thus Twitter is another useful method of link building outreach in Japan.

We have corporate Twitter accounts with some followers of about less than 1,000, which consider having some credibility in Japanese Twitter users, and we use it to reach out to sites’ webmasters.

Step 5: Now start outreaching, track and followup

Now it is all set; I start outreaching. Tracking and proper management are crucial for the link building outreach campaign. If I make mistakes and contacted twice the same person, it destroys the trust and is likely to lose the negotiation, thus tracking who to contact and when is essential and follow up, which I also think necessary in our outreach.

I have a couple of outreaching or CMS tools in the past, but ultimately I like the Google spreadsheet is most. Some paid tools are great but sometimes does not work in Japanese and contact form-focused cultures. With Google spreadsheet, I can be very customized and easy to collaborate with clients, which gives the campaign’s full transparency.

We are usually keeping track of this information in the sheet and shared with clients, for example;

• root domain
• category or topics of the site
• brand mention or related page
• contact information / form page / emails
• name of the contact person
• DA / DR
• TF / CF
• Traffic estimation (Global / Local Japanese)
• first contacted date
• last, the followup date
• replies (English translation)
• offer/price
• status
• link placed URL

Type of the backlink we build from Japanese site for Japanese Link Building Outreach

As we mentioned above, depending on the topics or industries you want to get the link from or to, deciding what time of the backlink you can get from the Japanese are essential for the strategy.

Here are some of these examples, but most of them are similar to English link building outreach.

Brand mentione & Broken links

By researching the keywords or brand’s name in Japanese, you may find some mentioned or broken links related to your topics.

This type of link reasonably easy to get since the site owners already mentioned what we try to link for if the brands are unique or strong.

Competitiors back links

This one is a famous approach in Japanese link building outreach too. You have to get them a backlink list for competitors using tools like Ahref and approach to the site, which already placed links.

The key to the approach is to know who is the competitors. You may be able to find it using tools, but I recommend spending a fair amount of time researching potential competitors.

Guest Post

As we described above, the guest post is not popular in Japan. But it works. As most people do not know about guest posts, I stay away from using the term “guest post” and explain what we offer and ask to do for them.

When it gets to the later stage or even the first contact, having a high-quality sample guest post in hand as the sample is beneficial to better response and successful link building outreach to Japanese sites.

Press Release

A press release is an excellent option to gain some presence here in Japan as well as get backlinks from some of the strong news media if you have the right service products or exciting fact or survey,

Although most of the link is not do-follow links, with the cost of couple hundreds of dollar to some famous PR service in Japan, you can get a fair amount of backlinks, and some are the strong do-follow link.

If some reporters get interested in your topics, they will write about it, and you can quickly gain great domain power.

First, you should have good content for PR; a good example is a new service launch in Japan, exciting findings of the Japanese market, etc. Secondly, quality piece of PR documents that follow some uniques Japanese PR format. I do not recommend merely translate your English PR documents and publish them; it only likely to be rejected or wasting your money on PR service.

Our Japanese Link Building Outreach Service

I have explained some facts and detailed how-to conduct link building outreach in Japanese to Japanese site inside out.

Does all of this overwhelming for you? or do you not have any Japanese native speaker do it? Let us introduce our link building outreach service.

Done-For-You Service

You do not have to worried about everything above I explained; we simply do it for you. All we need is your criteria or requirement for the backlinks and your offers or pitch.

We’ll take it and modifies to be fitted more into the Japanese Market or suggest another approach that we recommend if we think it will not work here in Japan.

You do not have to speak Japanese or hire random Japanese native staff or freelancers in Upworkds to teach link-building outreach.

100% Manual and from/by local Japanese

You already noticed that English is our second language (I personally live outside Japan at an early age, though), and our entire staff is native and local Japan.

As I described, the manual outreach always yields a better result, so our native and local Japanese link builders research the target and craft personal outreach messages every time and negotiate.

You do not have to worry about wired English translation that loses the trust, sending from the non-Japanese IP address (which many people actually see it from the form contact), or contacting in very inappropriate time of the day because of timezone.

We are all based in Tokyo, Japan, and worked from here. The link-building outreach to Japanese site owners will be done from a Japanese IP address and appropriate Japanese time.

Of course, No PBN, No Link Firm, No web 2.0

Finally, we all understood the danger and meaningless of PBN, link firm, or backlink from web 2.0 sites like the forum, social account profile, etc.

As you can see from all the steps I described, our link building outreach is “outreach,” not buying some link from link firm or PBN, and spamming at web 2.0 site.

Related Article: Does PBN (Private Blog Network) link building work in Japan?

Japanese link building outreach is challenging but possible

I have seen a lot of non-Japanese clients of us saying getting links from Japanese site are challenging. It may be true, compared to the English link building culture.

However, with a proper approach and proper strategy, it is possible, and we can help. Please contact if you have an interest in it.