How to Find Publishers of Websites
Sometimes, you may have to get in contact with a site’s owner or someone who has access to that site’s articles for different reasons. We’ll go into more detail on this in today’s article, but we’ll also tell you how to find a website’s publisher.
There are several different methods and the best thing is that you don’t need any complicated software — there are tools that you can use for the purpose, of course, but more often than not, finding a website publisher is far easier that you might have thought.
Why would you want to look for the publisher of a website?
Since you’re on this site, you can expect that the first reason we would highlight here would be link building. And it is true, this is in fact one of the most significant reasons you might want to look for the publisher info — since you can reach out to them individually and even pay them if you have to.
But there are other reasons, such as academic ones (if the article used some scientific data, for example, but the author forgot to cite it properly, and that data belongs to you, you probably want to be credited for your effort) or business ones. Maybe you would like to also credit that author for their work, meaning cite them in your articles, so you have to know their identity.
In the past, lots of affiliate website owners would keep their identity hidden, or at least they’d try to do it. Sometimes, they would do it because they would not want their competition to know what sites they had, or they might have had other reasons.
But that is why getting in touch with the right person if you were to, say, want to buy one of their websites would be quite difficult. As you can expect, the amount of spam that ends up in a website owner’s inbox is impressive, to say the least, which means that even if you did write to the official email address specified on the site, your email might not have been read by anyone.
So, now that we noted several reasons why you might want to know who is the publisher of a website, let us move on to the methods you can use.
How to find authors of websites
Check the site pages
This is going to sound pretty basic, but the truth is that more often than not, it is quite effective. Almost any site has a Contact or About Us page, and depending on the company, there could also be a Team page.
Even if you can’t manage to get in touch with someone from the information you have on the Contact page, you might still find some on the other two that we have mentioned.
There’s another tip that we have for you in this case. Let’s say that you have a Team page where several people are listed, but their full names are not specified. This can happen if the website doesn’t rely on E-A-T, so the site owner might not be interested in using the full names of a publisher on a website.
So this might seem a little unorthodox, but you can actually use the images that the authors have on the site and then perform a reverse Google Image Search to see whether nothing comes up.
If there are no results, in that case, the site might be using fake personas rather than real people. But if these are real individuals, you are quite likely to come across something, whether their Twitter or LinkedIn profile or even an official site like a university or college page (especially for people who’ve completed their graduate and PhD degrees).
And once you find those people’s names, the sky’s the limit as to what information you can extract. You can even write to them via social media, although for this purpose, we suggest using LinkedIn online. Do not go on their Facebook accounts as this will look strange.
How to find publisher information on a website using WHOIS
This is perhaps one of the easiest methods for coming across website owners since you don’t really have to put in a lot of effort.
Go to lookup.icann.org and simply type out the domain name. But we’d also like to note that this method might not work depending on the ways the domain was purchased.
For example, if people individually buy the domain and the hosting, their information is likely to show up in ICANN, but if they get it through a company like WordPress, for example, the information that’s going to be displayed when you search their domain is likely to be the one from WordPress, not the owner.
There is also a tax that people can pay every year to make sure that their information remains confidential. Naturally, the authorities can have access to it, but regular people might not.
How to find publishers of websites using Google
This might also sound a little basic, but you can always copy and paste a portion of a text from an article you have found on the site of your interest in the Google search bar.
If you suspect that the text is copied from another source and you want to do something about it, this method can simply display the other sites where the article appears.
In other words, you can effectively discover the original author of the published material and get in touch with them, not the person who has copied the content.
How to find publishers of websites using tools
One of the oldest tools that has been around and that can be used for finding people’s emails through their social media accounts is Rapportive. There is talk that LinkedIn actually purchased this tool to prevent people from using it.
And from what we noticed, the Chrome extension is no longer available in the Chrome Web Store, which means that it could have been taken down because of privacy issues.
But the point that we are trying to make is that you can use a variety of tools to get people’s emails without handling too much hassle on where to find a publisher of a website. Here are several more examples, but do keep in mind that some of these might no longer be available if you are reading this several months after we published this post.
Clearbit Connect
This one is specifically geared toward company employees, which means that it might be counterproductive to use it if you’re not really looking for someone who has a career background.
But if, say, the publisher you are looking to get in contact with works for a company like Forbes, you’ll come across it alright. Clearbit Connect resembles Rapportive in some ways in that it delivers all the useful info you need on the right side of your Gmail page.
Use the extension to search the company and you’ll get displayed all the employees and their respective email addresses.
Hunter
Hunter is one of the biggest and best-known email marketing platforms on the planet. It can help you take your link building efforts to a whole new level by assisting you in designing the perfect outreach campaign.
But it can also pull out the data you need from websites. Naturally, the success rate can vary depending on a number of factors, so in some cases, the tool might not manage to get the emails you need — which means you’ll also have to use an alternative or do the work yourself using the methods that we already mentioned.
Email Finder – LeadLeaper
This is another quite popular Chrome extension that you can use for finding people’s emails, but there is a catch — it needs to be used with LinkedIn as that is the place it pulls its data from.
LeadLeaper is geared more toward business emails, though, which can be fine if you are doing a link building campaign and you want people to work with you, such as by adding a link to one of their previous articles or by posting a new article where they include your brand, for example.
LinkedIn Email Finder – PIPILEADS
This extension has gathered a lot of appreciation from those that have used it in the past, and they range from recruiters and business owners to sales and marketing professionals. In fact, some people continue to use it even after they’ve finished their work with it just to have a bit of advantage over the competition.
As its name suggests, this one also works with LinkedIn, but there’s also a catch. You have to actually click on somebody’s profile to be able to see their email data — and it goes without saying that it will be the email address of their LinkedIn account, which doesn’t necessarily mean their personal or business one.
The tool’s dashboard will display the first and last name of that individual, their personal and official email, the company they work for, the industry they are in, and also their location. For businesses, the extension will also display the number of employees, but you can get that from LinkedIn anyway.
Name2Email
This one also resembles Rapportive in some ways in that you will have to use your Gmail account to try out several email address combinations and then get the right person.
However, with this one, you will specifically have to look for their professional email. Otherwise, it’s not going to work. There are some bugs that you’ll have to do your best to work around, but the app does get updated relatively often, so you can simply download it again from the Chrome Web Store.
How to reach out to a publisher of a website
Whether you are looking to find someone’s information for commercial purposes, legal reasons, or anything else, you have to make sure that the way you communicate is accurate and leaves no room for interpretation.
If you are also doing an outreach campaign, you want to make sure that you’re as clear as possible, but you might want to avoid starting with your pitch. If you are literally reaching out to someone you have never communicated with in the past, they might show no interest in you whatsoever. So you have to somehow establish a connection or at least some form of relationship before you make your pitch.
Not a lot of people have time to create customized messages, but the truth is that some outreach campaigns fail specifically because of this. In fact, some tools might malfunction and leave out blank spaces instead of that person’s name, and that just looks bad.
Hunter works great for most outreach campaigns, but you have to make sure you have complete control over what’s happening, such as who’s responding. When you get a positive reply, you have to make sure you respond appropriately.
While this might also mean that you will lose more time, it definitely pays off. Those people might ask you a particular question and if you have an automatic response, it might not include the answer.
Final thoughts
For some people, finding the identity and emails of website publishers can be an actual job, so you need to make sure that you are using the right tools. Do keep in mind that some of the Chrome extensions we have mentioned in this article might have privacy issues, so they might be taken out of the store at some point.
In the end, you will have to tell how ethical looking for someone’s information is for you and if you are willing to use potentially shady ways of getting to it. And let’s face it, most people are willing to go the extra mile and resort to strange methods if they have to, so they are those you are competing against.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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