Digital PR

Mention, link, and what each one does

The two products of a placement do different jobs. The link is a signal to a search engine that another site vouches for this one, and it carries readers across. The mention is a statement, in a third party’s words, that the business exists, does a certain kind of work, and is worth naming. For an AI assistant that has fetched the publication’s page while answering a question, the mention is what it reads. A link with no sentence around it gives the assistant nothing to say; a sentence with no link still names the business.

The placements that do the most work are the ones that state something checkable: what the business did, for whom, with what result, said by someone who is not the business. Coverage earned with a real finding, a real event or a real opinion tends to read that way. Coverage bought as a post tends not to.

The line the spam policy draws

Google’s spam policies treat buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, including paying for posts that contain links and trading goods or services for them. The same page says that paid placements are a normal part of advertising, and are acceptable when the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". So a paid article is not the problem; a paid article whose link pretends to be editorial is. Digital PR, properly done, does not need the distinction, because nothing was paid for and the link is a plain one.