PR Backlinks: How to Build Links on the Web’s Biggest News Sites

Talk to most link builders and you will probably hear that getting PR backlinks from trustworthy, authoritative sources is the pinnacle of white hat link building.

This means links from the biggest newspapers, magazines and industry-leading blogs. These are the kinds of links that Google wants to see and which are almost guaranteed to skyrocket you up the search engine rankings. 

Websites like the Washington Post, The Economist, Entrepreneur, etc., are all important, powerful sites with the ability to pass on a ton of link juice. 

At dofollow, we’ve built PR backlinks for our clients to some of the web’s biggest sites: 

They are not easy to get, but if you know what you’re doing–crucially, how to approach writers and journalists–you can end up building fantastic backlinks to amazing sites. 

So what, exactly, are press links?

A press link is any link that comes from a journalist, newspaper or magazine. 

It’s a hard-to-define term because the “press” is such a broad term, but link builders usually lump PR backlinks into a couple of different categories:

• Those that come from journalistic outlets with editorial processes that carefully pick and choose information to include in stories. 
• Those that you acquire as the result of press releases published on sites that put out hundreds of these releases every day. 

The first type of digital PR link building yields the highest quality links and the ones with the biggest impact on your SEO. 

The second type tends not to have any positive impact on your SEO (for reasons that we will delve into below). 

The benefits of Digital PR Links

If you are able to incorporate numerous branded links from big-name newspapers and magazines into your backlink profile, this is an unparalleled trust signal for search engines. 

Getting links from these kinds of sites provides a lot of SEO value because Google’s PageRank algorithm knows that these sites are reputable, with storied histories and strong editorial practices in place to ensure quality. 

This is a backlink we got from Inc.com–one of the most popular webzines online, with a huge number of monthly readers and visitors. 

Google knows this site and values endorsements from places like this (in the form of dofollow backlink). 

They improve your E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Trust and Authority)

The E-E-A-T concept has become very popular in the SEO world over the last few years as Google has sought to clean up a lot of the SEO spam and lazy websites from the search results. 

To get sustained attention and visibility from Google, it has become essential that you publish content that demonstrates expertise, authority and trust. 

PR backlinks are going to be a major boost in this regard because you have the web’s biggest sites vouching for you. 

This isn’t to say that press links are the only kind of link you need. 

You still need to incorporate links from niche-relevant websites, as well as links to your key content pages, linkable assets, etc. 

But PR links are extremely powerful, and if you know how to approach the process and, importantly, what to avoid, you can build a very strong foundation for your backlink profile that will provide a lot of link juice over the long term.

Don’t use press release services for link building

SEOs and link builders have been using and paying for a range of press release services for a long time. 

It’s rarely a good idea for small websites and brands to use these services. If you’re a household name like Sony or Coca-Cola, then, yes, people are going to pay attention to your press releases. 

In fact, if you’re a big company with a big market impact, journalists are going to be lining up to get a story from you. 

Even big names like Cision aren’t really worth paying for. 

Their free HARO (Help a Reporter Out) service, on the other hand, is definitely worth learning and using. 

Just fill out a few fields, and you’re set up to start earning seriously powerful HARO backlinks 

The reason that a lot of paid digital PR services aren’t worth the time and money is that all that ends up happening is that your press release is sent out to a bunch of small, low value websites. 

How to build PR links the right way

PR backlinks are very high quality backlinks and, like any such links, can be quite difficult to build. 

There are a few methods, however, that can help you increase the odds of digital PR success. 

Hiring a digital PR link building agency

The major caveat here is that you have to be VERY cautious if you choose to do this. 

There are a bunch of great digital PR specialists out there who are going to try hard to land you real PR backlinks from actual journalists and online news and magazines. 

This is what digital PR tends to look like

You hire a reputable content marketing service for anywhere from $15,000 to over $50k to create and run a custom digital PR campaign for you. 

They build some very nice data-rich content for you. 

Next, they will reach out to publications and journalists and try to get them to share that content. 

The article is not the smash hit you were hoping it would be and, more often than not, you end up building only a handful of links. Sometimes, the odd article goes viral and ends up all over the internet (which is, of course, what you want), but an article flops more often than it shakes the internet. 

PR backlinks from local news publications

Another way to increase the odds of success while building PR backlinks is to include some local news in your PR campaigns. 

Of course, this only works if you’re a local business somewhere. 

But if you’re a local business with verifiable roots in a local community, you will probably get a lot more attention from that local newspaper or magazine than big internationally read publications. 

And that doesn’t always have to mean lower domain authority sites. 

Many large news outlets have local affiliates that enjoy the same authority and trust as the parent outlet/company. 

If you were a local business somewhere like Greensboro, North Carolina, you might try building a PR backlink to a site like Fox8 WGHP in your digital PR campaign (the local Fox News affiliate). 

They have a domain rating of 76: 

Any email or social media messages you sent to an editor working at a place like this would probably be much more likely to give your outreach the time of day. 

Digital PR’s main downside

Digital PR is expensive and unpredictable. 

You can put your heart and soul into a piece of novel content backed by original data that is presented in a visually appealing way that is sure to receive good engagement and get crickets. 

The most disheartening thing isn’t that no one cared enough to read and promote the content, it’s that you simply weren’t in the right place at the right time. 

So much of a successful press backlinks campaign comes down to whether or not the journalists and writers who decide the fate of content are available to actually see and read it. 

There are so many people around the world trying to get these people’s attention at all times so you either have to know people personally (which is ideal), or you have to hope that you catch them at an opportune moment. 

How most people get PR backlinks

The best way to get PR backlinks is via the aforementioned free HARO services provided by Cision. 

This service sends out three daily emails that contain hundreds of requests from journalists and bloggers. 

The email is broken down into categories like Business and Finance, Healthcare, Lifestyle, Technology, etc. 

Each query is basically a question (or series of questions) that a writer or journalist has related to an article they are working on. 

Your role is as the expert opinion provider, which helps them answer that question. 

Take a look at this query from the leading HR journal SHRM

If you enter the query, there is a series of questions they would like answered for the piece: 

At the bottom of the query is a “requirements” section that stipulates what kind of expertise and experience you need to have in order for your response to be considered for the story: 

If you were a good fit for this query, you would respond to the email with your answers to these questions and hope that the journalist found them useful enough to include in the story (if they even got around to reading them at all). 

You might be rewarded with a dofollow backlink for your effort. You might get a branded mention or nofollow links (no SEO value, but potentially a good source of referral traffic). 

SHRM is a very high domain authority website and one of the most respected HR journals out there. 

Recognition from them would be a big deal. Of course, the relevance also needs to be there. Not all backlinks–even PR links–are equally valuable. 

PR backlinks from irrelevant websites are not going to be viewed favorably by search engines. 

If you’re a tech company and you get backlinks from TechCrunch or Wired, those are really valuable links. If you’re that same tech company and you have a link from Bon Apetit, it’s going to be a lot less valuable. 

Search engines want to see relevance. 

Is PR link building worth it for branded mentions and nofollow link referral traffic?

Something we briefly touched on above was the idea of referral traffic from nofollow links. 

While these links aren’t going to help your domain authority and ranking in the same way dofollow links will, they can still be a valuable source of traffic–especially if they come from big reputable sites. 

Take the below link GoodFirms that we got: 

Of course, we would have preferred a dofollow link. The above link has no bearing on where dofollow appears in the search engine results pages. 

What it is, however, is a conduit for some of GoodFirms traffic to our site. Maybe someone reads this article, decides to click on our link, checks out our site and decides to do business with us. 

It’s hard to say how often that happens, but the chances of it happening when you are acknowledged and linked to by a site like GoodFirms are high enough that it’s worth considering the above backlink as a win. 

What’s more, having some nofollow links in your backlink profile is good from a naturalness perspective. 

Google wants to see a variety of different link types in your backlink profile–dofollow, nofollow, homepage, deep page, social media, etc. 

This is how a legitimate, trustworthy site builds and acquires links over time naturally.

PR backlinks are definitely worth it

Don’t let this article discourage you from spending time pursuing PR backlinks. 

They are an important part of any backlink profile, can be major branding boosts, and it feels really good when you get them. 

If big publications are choosing to link to your content and website, it’s likely because you are worth linking to. 

Other people see this, and Google sees this. 

Of course, because so much work goes into building PR links–work which can easily be for nothing if you don’t know what you’re doing–a lot of businesses choose to work with professional link builders who know the industry, know the odds and know what works. 

Get in touch with dofollow today and find out more about how we build high quality backlinks on some of the web’s biggest and most prestigious news sites.