Earned links come from people who found your work useful enough to reference. The approach is to create assets worth linking to, make them easy to find, and let attention do the work.
Need help with SEO?
Comppound runs SEO and AI search for SaaS companies. We plan what to publish, produce it with AI, and every page passes automated checks, and a person reviews samples and anything high-risk.
- Published to your site and tracked in Search Console
- One person answers for your account
- Plans from $400 a month, terms from 3 months
What earns links
- Original research and data
- Free tools and calculators
- Definitive guides and glossaries
- Clear explanations of changes in your field
- Strong opinions that people respond to
Help it get seen
Even great assets need an audience. Share them with the people who cover the topic, mention them in communities where they are relevant, and keep them updated.
Common mistakes
Publishing and waiting
Links rarely arrive without some promotion.
Frequently Asked Questions
It can be, but earned links tend to be more durable and carry less risk.
Keep reading
- Link Building: Link building is the work of getting other relevant sites to link to yours, by creating things worth citing and asking the right people to cite them.
- Linkable Asset: A linkable asset is a page designed to be worth citing, such as original research, a free tool or a reference guide, that others link to naturally.
- Link Bait: Link bait is content made mainly to attract attention and links, such as bold studies, controversial takes or striking visuals.
- Original Research: Original research is content based on data a company collected itself, such as surveys, product usage analysis or experiments, published as new findings.
- Authority Score: Authority Score is a Semrush metric from 1 to 100 that grades a site or page using link, traffic and spam signals. Google does not use it.
- Backlink: A backlink is a link from another website to a page on yours. Search engines use backlinks to find pages and as one signal of which pages are worth ranking.
- Blogger Outreach: Blogger outreach is contacting writers, editors and site owners to tell them about a resource, story or expert that could be useful to their readers.
- Citation Building: Citation building means listing a business in directories and data sources. Useful for local and niche visibility; poor directories add nothing.
