A plain definition.
A PR link is a hyperlink to your website that appears inside press coverage: a news article, a feature, a product roundup or an expert piece on a publication with a real audience. The journalist chose to include it because your brand was the source of the story, the quote or the product. That editorial choice is what separates a PR link from every other kind.
The terms overlap: PR links, PR backlinks, digital PR links and editorial links all describe the same thing. The older phrases come from the press-release era; the newer ones reflect that the work now happens through online journalism, data stories and reactive commentary.
The four types of PR link.
- Data story links. A journalist cites your research, survey or index and links to the source. The most durable type, because the article keeps getting referenced long after publication.
- Expert comment links. Your spokesperson is quoted in a live story and credited with a link. Fast to earn, often in the nationals, and they compound as journalists come back to the same source.
- Product feature links. Gift guides, roundups and reviews that name the 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 carries its own link on its own domain. Never promised, frequently delivered by a strong story.
Why PR links outperform bought links.
Google has spent two decades learning to tell a link someone chose to give from a link someone arranged. PR links carry every signal of the former: genuine editorial context, a publication that earns its authority daily, a natural anchor, and no scheme to detect. Bought links carry the opposite fingerprint, which is why they need disavowing after every update and PR links never do.
They also age differently. A news article stays published; the link inside it keeps working for years with no invoice. A rented placement disappears when the payments stop. One is an expense with a liability attached, the other an asset that compounds, and our comparison of digital PR and link building sets the two side by side.
What a PR link is not.
Plenty of things are sold as PR links that are nothing of the sort. Press release distribution links, where a wire service syndicates your release to hundreds of sites nobody reads, are nofollow and worthless. Sponsored content marked as such is advertising, and Google treats it accordingly. Guest posts on sites that exist to sell guest posts are the definition of a link scheme, however many the vendor bundles for a few hundred pounds.
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's not a PR link, whatever the invoice says.
How to judge a PR link.
Four questions sort the good from the decorative. Does the publication have real readers, not just a domain metric? Is the link inside the editorial body, not a footer or an author bio? 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? A link that passes all four is worth more than twenty that pass none, and the reporting we send with every batch is built around those questions rather than a raw count.
How we earn PR links for clients.
We run defined campaign batches: five, ten or twenty editorial placements a month at £2,500, £4,500 or £8,000, each targeted for completion within 30 to 45 days. Every batch moves through Insight, Angle, Asset, Pitch and Coverage, mixes formats to suit the news cycle, and reports each placement with the publication, URL and link attribute as it lands. You choose the target pages; we keep the anchors natural and the publication standard high. If you are ready to buy PR links as a managed batch, that page explains what you're buying.