Editorial Link

An editorial link is literally a backlink that another website gives you freely and naturally because they genuinely found your content worth linking to.

This link will have been added without being paid for, or exchanging anything in return, or placing it yourself. Editorial links are the kind of thing that Google’s whole ranking philosophy was established to reward, meaning that they’re a real, unsolicited endorsement from one website to another.

It’s for this reason that they tend to be the most valuable and durable links you can earn as part of any marketing strategy.

Editorial Link Advantages

The value that editorial links hold is also the reason that they’re so highly sought after and so difficult to get. When a writer or editor decides to link to you, they’re vouching for your content with their own site’s credibility.

This form of linking comes with no other incentive than to show that your content was genuinely useful, which is precisely the signal that Google wants to detect. Because editorial links can’t easily be manufactured at scale, they carry trust on a level that engineered links can’t replicate. One single editorial link from a respected, relevant publication can outweigh dozens of other links that you’ve placed yourself.

There are some important contrasts between editorial links and the many other kinds of backlinks that you create or acquire in a more direct way. Links that you add yourself using a guest post, a paid link, a directory submission, or a reciprocal exchange are all, to varying degrees, links that you’ve engineered rather than earned.

This doesn’t mean that the links you’ve worked to build aren’t useful, but none carries the same level of weight as a link that someone gave you purely because they believed your work deserved it. With this in mind, editorial links sit at the top of the hierarchy purely because they’re the hardest to fake.

Earning Links

So, how do you earn editorial links, given that you can’t simply ask for them? The answer is to do so in an indirect way, by creating content that’s genuinely worth linking to and ensuring that the right people see it.

In this regard, original research and data are your best supporting acts. Create citation-worthy copy and offer genuinely useful tools and resources, strong opinion pieces, and comprehensive guides.

It’s these sorts of links that 10x content is made for, and its ability to become a key reference point can attract multiple editorial links over time.

Digital PR can also amplify this effect by getting your link-worthy assets right under the noses of journalists and bloggers who are more likely to cite them. The work here is in building something worth referencing and then earning the attention it deserves.

Things to Remember

Although they’re highly desirable, editorial links can be very slow and even more difficult to conjure up, which is why most people focus more on practical link building, which is geared towards proactive SEO tactics.

However, the most successful long-term strategies will always keep editorial links in mind as a more long-term goal, using proactive outreach to support and amplify content that’s designed to provide links naturally, rather than relying on engineered links alone.