About the checklists
Each of the nine modules has a checklist: the things you should have done, in order, before the module counts as finished. They are the closest thing this site has to progress tracking, and unlike a progress bar they belong to you rather than to me. Each one is short on purpose: a module's checklist fits on one page, and a checklist you can finish is worth more than a comprehensive one you abandon.
What a checklist is for, and what it is not
A checklist is a memory aid for work you already understand. It exists because competent people skip steps under time pressure, not because they do not know the steps. Every item on these lists corresponds to something a lesson in that module taught you how to do, and the item is phrased as an action on your own site rather than as a concept to recall.
What a checklist is not is a substitute for the module. If you download all nine and work through them without reading the lessons, you will complete tasks whose purpose you cannot explain, which is worse than doing nothing because it feels like progress. The items are deliberately terse — "score your top twenty referring domains against your rubric" assumes you have a rubric and know what scoring means, and both of those come from module 2. A checklist is also not an audit deliverable, not a client document, and not a guarantee: finishing every box means you have done the work described, not that your link profile is now good.
Why Markdown and plain text rather than a PDF
Every checklist comes in two formats, and neither of them is a PDF. That is a considered decision.
The Markdown version uses real checkbox syntax, so it drops straight into a notes app, a task manager, a wiki or a repository and behaves like a live task list. Practitioners do not work in PDFs. They paste things into Notion, Obsidian, Asana, Jira, a Google Doc or a README, and a PDF resists every one of those — you cannot tick a box in it, cannot edit an item, cannot merge it into an existing project template without retyping the whole thing.
The plain text version is for printing, pasting into an email, dropping into a ticket, or handing to somebody who does not care what Markdown is. It survives every system it passes through because there is nothing in it to break.
Both contain the same items and the module's lesson URLs at the bottom, so a checklist that has traveled through three systems still says where it came from. There is no signup for any of them: no email address, no download gate, no "check your inbox for the link." They are static files at fixed URLs. Right-click and save, or link to them from your own documentation if they are useful to your team — they are meant to be used, not collected.
How to adapt them
They are written for a generic site, which means some items will not apply to yours. Delete those. Adding to them is more useful still: as you work a module, append the items specific to your own situation, in your own words, at the point in the sequence where they belong. A team can turn a module checklist into a recurring template — the module 8 list in particular works well as a quarterly review rather than a one-time exercise, and the module 5 list works as the standard operating procedure for every outreach campaign you run afterward. Keep the lesson URLs at the bottom when you adapt them, so whoever inherits the document can find the reasoning.
What each of the nine covers
- Module 1, foundations. Establishing your baseline: what your profile looks like today, what your goal actually is, and the vocabulary you need before any of the later items make sense.
- Module 2, judging link quality. Building the scoring rubric and applying it — relevance first, then metrics and their limits, then whether the linking page is alive and indexed.
- Module 3, reading the link graph. Pulling and reading your own profile at scale: tiers, Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow, network footprints, and a tiered audit of what is pointing at you.
- Module 4, prospecting. Defining a target set, running a competitor link gap analysis, working the search operators, finding the actual human, and scoring what you find before you contact any of it.
- Module 5, outreach. Preparing the sending infrastructure, writing and testing the pitch, setting the follow-up sequence, and recording responses so the next campaign starts warmer than this one.
- Module 6, digital PR. Auditing what you have that a newsroom could use, developing one story idea to the point where it can be pitched, and building the assets a journalist needs before you send anything.
- Module 7, choosing and running tactics. Matching tactics to your site and constraints, writing the ninety-day plan, and setting up the workflow and tooling to run it without losing track.
- Module 8, measurement, risk and recovery. Choosing what to measure, building a report that survives scrutiny, checking your own profile for the patterns that look unnatural, and knowing what you would do if a manual action arrived.
- Module 9, the future of link building. Auditing your unlinked mentions, checking how your brand is represented as an entity, and establishing a baseline for how often you are cited in AI answers so you can see it move.
My suggestion: work the checklist as you go rather than reading a module and then trying to reconstruct it afterward. Most of the items are small pieces of work on your own site, and they compound. Nine finished checklists is a genuine audit of your link position, assembled a piece at a time.
Module 1 — Foundations: how links actually work
Work through these before you send a single outreach email or spend a dollar on links.
Module 2 — Judging link quality
Run every link opportunity through this before you spend an hour, a favor, or a dollar on it.
Module 3 — Reading the link graph
The tiered audit as a working checklist: what to record at each tier, which ratios to compute, the footprint tests, and the findings that belong in a report.
Module 4 — Prospecting and research
Work through this before you send a single email. Everything here happens upstream of outreach, and every hour spent here saves several downstream.
Module 5 — Outreach that works
Run through this before the first send of any campaign. Most of it takes one afternoon, and skipping it is how a campaign burns a domain.
Module 6 — Digital PR and earned media
Run this before you send a single media pitch. Most digital PR failures are visible on this list before the campaign starts.
Module 7 — Choosing and running tactics
The planning and diagnosis checklist for this module: matching tactics to your situation, the 90-day sequence, the minimum tool set, the replacement-rate math, and the six ways campaigns die.
Module 8 — Measurement, risk and recovery
The measurement and risk checklist: counting domains rather than links, reporting distinct links, reading a profile honestly, calibrating what junk really means, and the ongoing comparison that catches lost links.
Module 9 — The future of link building
A working checklist for the four practical changes in this module — reporting, mention tracking, entity consistency and quotable material — plus the entity audit from Lesson 9.3.