What digital PR backlinks are
A digital PR backlink is a link to your website inside press coverage: a news article, a feature, a product roundup or an expert piece on a publication with its own audience. The journalist included it because your brand was the source of the story, the quote or the product. That editorial choice is what separates it from other kinds of link.
The terms overlap. PR backlinks, PR links, digital PR links and editorial links all describe the same thing. PR backlinks entered SEO vocabulary when agencies noticed that press coverage produced the best links in a client's profile, and the label was later stretched to cover press-release wire links and sponsored articles too. Only editorial citations are worth paying for.
The four types of PR link
- Data story links. A journalist cites research, a survey or an index and links to the source. These tend to last longest, because the article keeps getting referenced after publication.
- Expert comment links. Commentary attributed to your business is quoted in a live story and credited with a link. Our team researches and writes it from public data and your published positions. These are quick to earn and often appear in the nationals.
- Product feature links. Gift guides, roundups and reviews that name a product and link to where readers can buy it. The most commercially direct type.
- Syndication links. When a national piece travels through regional stablemates, MSN or Yahoo, each copy can carry its own link on its own domain. Nobody can promise them, and we report them separately from the batch.
Why digital PR backlinks carry weight
A backlink inside a national news article sits in content people read, on a domain that earns its authority every day, placed by a journalist with no stake in your rankings. Google's systems have long been built to tell a link someone chose to give from a link someone arranged. Grade the publications by third-party metrics if you like, from the DA 40s for a solid regional title to the mid 90s for the biggest national newsrooms, but readership is the better test.
Most link acquisition treats the link as the product and the content around it as packaging. Digital PR starts with the coverage, and the backlinks come with it. They also last: a news article usually stays published, while a rented placement tends to disappear when the payments stop. Our PR for SEO page sets out the search case.
Dofollow, nofollow and what happens
Editorial coverage on many national titles is followed. Some publishers mark every outbound link nofollow as house policy, and that decision is the publisher's. We pursue the most authoritative, relevant placement available and report the link attribute for every placement exactly as published. We don't promise a dofollow we can't control.
Two things soften the distinction in practice. Google treats nofollow as a hint instead of a directive, and a nofollow link on a title your customers read still brings referral visits, brand searches and the kind of citation pattern that authoritative sites tend to have.
Anchor text in editorial links
When a journalist links to you, the anchor is usually your brand name, your bare URL, or a phrase like "according to new research". News desks don't link with commercial keywords, which is why the profile looks natural. A distribution dominated by branded and natural-phrase anchors is what an authoritative site tends to look like, while a profile stuffed with exact-match commercial anchors is a common sign of manipulation. You can state a preference, and we keep it natural.
What a PR backlink isn't
Plenty of things are sold as PR links that aren't editorial coverage. A wire service will syndicate a press release to hundreds of sites for a fee. Those links are usually nofollow, on pages few people read, in content identical to hundreds of other copies, so they add little. A release still has a job, as the document a journalist writes from. Sponsored content is advertising, and Google expects paid links to be labelled. Guest posts on sites that exist to sell them are what Google's spam policies describe as link schemes, however many a vendor bundles together.
The test is simple: would a journalist with no financial interest have published this, and would a reader recognise the publication? If either answer is no, it isn't a PR link, whatever the invoice says.
Five red flags in PR backlink offers
- A price per link on a menu. Editorial coverage can't be sold by the unit, because the publication decides what runs.
- Guaranteed named mastheads. Anyone promising the BBC or Forbes is describing a paid arrangement, a contributor account or a sponsored section.
- Turnaround in days at volume. Real pitching takes weeks; a hundred links in a week means a network.
- Anchor text of your choosing. Journalists don't take anchor instructions. A vendor who does isn't dealing with journalists.
- No named journalist or article context. If the report can't show you the article and the writer, treat it as a paid placement.
How to judge a PR backlink
Four questions sort the useful from the decorative. Does the publication have readers, measured by traffic and by whether your customers would recognise the name? Is the link inside the editorial body, away from footers and author bios? Is the anchor natural: a brand name, a URL or a phrase like "new research shows"? And does the story sit on a desk your customers read? The desk matters as much as the masthead, because a money-pages citation in a national title reaches a different reader from the same paper's showbiz section.
Domain metrics are a rough filter at best, and the link types you should avoid inflate them easily. The reports we send with every batch are built around these questions, and our guide to measuring digital PR covers how to weigh coverage.
Target pages and linkable assets
Journalists link to homepages, research pages and guides, and almost never to product or category pages from a news article, because that would read as an advert. We design around it: the campaign asset, a data study or an expert hub, is built to merit coverage and to sit within your site's structure, so the authority it collects can flow to commercial pages through internal links. Coverage lifts the domain, and your site structure decides where the lift goes.
How we earn digital PR backlinks
The same way every editorial link is earned: a story worth covering, pitched to the journalist who covers the subject, with one useful follow-up. We run defined batches of ten or twenty editorial placements at £4,500 or £7,500 a month, each targeted for completion within 30 to 45 days, and keep developing stories until the agreed number is live. The formats are data-led stories, reactive commentary and product features. Every placement is checked live and logged with the publication, URL, anchor, link attribute and target page, and results are reported as linked coverage, never as ranking promises. To buy a batch, see digital PR links. For the process step by step, see digital PR link building.