Digital PR for Link Building

Digital PR is the one link tactic that produces exactly the kind of link Google says it wants: chosen by an editor, on a site with a reputation to protect, inside content that exists for readers. It is also the tactic sitting closest to a policy line, because the mechanics of paid placement look almost identical from the outside. Getting the practice right means understanding both the craft and the line.

The line Google drew in March 2024

Google’s spam policies name advertorials and native advertising directly: paying for articles that include links passing ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites, is listed as link spam. The permitted version is the same placement with rel="sponsored" attached.

Then, in March 2024, Google added the site reputation abuse policy, enforced from 5 May 2024. It targets third-party pages published “with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals.” Google was explicit that not all third-party content violates the policy, noting that many publications host advertising content intended for their regular readers rather than to manipulate rankings. Two tests separate the cases: was there real editorial oversight, and was the purpose the ranking signal.

The practical consequence for a small business is that a purchased placement in an unsupervised “partners” or “brand voices” section of a well-known publication is now the specific thing the policy was written about. Earned coverage in the editorial part of the same publication is not. Same domain, opposite treatment, and the difference is whether an editor decided.

What changed in the sourcing landscape

For fifteen years, the default advice was to answer journalist queries on HARO. That route closed. HARO began in 2008, was acquired by Vocus in 2010, passed to Cision, was rebranded Connectively in 2023, and Cision discontinued the platform on 9 December 2024. Any guide still recommending HARO as a tactic has not been updated since 2024, which is a useful test to apply to link building advice generally.

Expert sourcing itself did not die with the platform, it fragmented. Successor query services exist, journalists post callouts on their own social accounts, and trade publications maintain their own contributor networks. What actually improved is the alternative: contacting the specific journalist who covers your sector directly, at the moment they are writing about it. That was always the higher-yield version, and the platform’s closure removed the crutch.

What a small business can legitimately offer

Journalists need three things and you can supply two of them. They need a fact nobody has published, a person who will say something specific on the record, and a deadline you can meet. The third is where most small businesses lose the placement: a reply two days later is a reply to a published article.

• Operational data from your own business, aggregated and anonymised, with the method and sample size stated. Real prices, real timelines, real demand patterns.
• A named person with a genuine title who will be quoted, be specific, and be available. Google’s rater guidelines describe evaluators researching content creators, so a real named expert is worth more than a company statement.
• Local specificity. A regional paper covering a national story needs the local version of it, and you are the local version.
• A dissenting view, held honestly. Agreement is not a story. A supplier explaining why the consensus advice in their trade is wrong is.

What you cannot legitimately offer is payment, product, or a reciprocal arrangement in exchange for the link. Google lists exchanging goods or services for links, and sending a product in exchange for a write-up including a link, among its link spam examples. If any of that is part of the arrangement, the link should carry rel="sponsored" and you should value the placement as advertising, which it is.

Measuring it without fooling yourself

A pickup count is a vanity metric because syndication inflates it: one placement republished across a group of regional titles reads as fifteen results and is closer to one. Count distinct publishers, then check how many of the placements actually contain a followed link, since many outlets nofollow all outbound links as blanket policy. That is a legitimate editorial choice and the coverage still has value, but it should change what you expect from the campaign.

The honest scorecard has four lines: distinct publishers, links that pass credit, referral sessions in the fortnight after publication, and whether the story produced anything you can point at later, such as being cited by the next journalist to cover the topic. Digital PR that only ever moves the first line is producing coverage nobody read.

Daniel Okafor

SEO & Organic Growth Lead

Daniel Okafor leads SEO and organic growth at ThisCom, helping small and medium businesses earn authority through technical SEO, content, and high-quality links.

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