An expert roundup is a post that asks a group of people in a field the same question and publishes their answers together. As a link building tactic, it works two ways: the publisher hopes contributors will share and link to the post, and contributors get a mention and sometimes a link from it. Roundups were heavily overused in the 2010s, and the format now works only when the question and the experts are genuinely interesting.
Why the format became popular
Roundups are cheap to produce and come with built-in promotion, because contributors like to share pieces that feature them. For contributors, they are a quick way to get a byline-style mention. That combination led to a flood of roundups asking generic questions of whoever would reply.
What makes one worth doing
Readers value roundups when the answers differ and come from people with real experience.
- A specific question with room for disagreement
- Contributors chosen for direct experience, not follower counts
- Editing that groups answers and draws out patterns
- A short summary of where experts agreed and where they did not
As a contributor
Contributing to roundups in respected publications can raise your profile. Treat requests from sites with no audience, or that ask for payment to be included, as you would any low-quality link opportunity: they rarely help.
Example
A roundup with an angle
An illustrative revenue operations platform, Quotafern, asks a dozen RevOps leaders one specific question: which pipeline metric they stopped reporting to the board, and why. The answers vary widely. Quotafern edits them into themes, and the piece is shared by contributors and cited in several newsletters because it says something no other article did.
Common mistakes
Asking a bland question
"What is your top SEO tip?" produces interchangeable answers that nobody wants to read or link to.
Requiring a link back for inclusion
Making a link a condition of participation turns the roundup into a link exchange.
Questions
Generic ones rarely do. Roundups with a sharp question and real experts still get shared and cited.
