SEO · 9 min read
Digital PR and link building differ on one question: who decides
These two are sold interchangeably and they are not the same purchase. One buys the chance that somebody independent will write about you; the other buys a placement from somebody who was paid. This is how to tell which is in the proposal in front of you, and what each is legitimately good for.
Written by Zubair Afzal, FounderUpdated
The difference, stated plainly
The two approaches on the dimensions that actually diverge
Not a scorecard, and not a claim that one is always right. Every row is a place where the two genuinely behave differently, starting with the one everything else follows from.
| Dimension | Digital PR | Link building as commonly sold |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides the link appears | An editor or writer with no obligation to you, who has not seen the story yet. | Whoever received the payment, which is why the outcome can be promised. |
| What you are actually buying | Effort, judgement and access: a story worth running and the relationships to get it in front of the right people. | A placement. The article, the site and often the anchor text are all arranged in advance. |
| How it is priced | By campaign or by month, because the output cannot honestly be quantified in advance. | By the link, sometimes by a tiered metric, which is why it is easy to compare on a spreadsheet. |
| How it fails | Loudly and immediately. The story does not land, the month produces nothing, and the fee was spent anyway. | Quietly and later. The deliverable always arrives; the consequence arrives on a timetable you do not set. |
| What it produces besides links | Audience, recognition, sales conversations, and a record of independent references to your business. | Very little. The pages are rarely read by anybody, which is part of why they were affordable. |
| Where the risk sits | On the budget. You may spend a quarter and have little to show for it. | On your domain. The supplier moves on; the profile stays with you. |
| What good reporting looks like | Named publications, uneven months, coverage and links reported as separate lines. | A consistent monthly count from sites that resemble one another, and reluctance to discuss sourcing. |
| When it is the right choice | When you have something genuinely new to say and can tolerate variable months. | Not one we recommend. Where paid placement is genuinely wanted, buy it as advertising and qualify the link. |
A ninety-second test
How to classify the proposal in front of you
Can they name the sites in advance?
Yes: An arrangement already exists with those sites. This is placement.
No: The decision sits with editors who have not seen it. This is earned.
Is there a price per link?
Yes: The link is the product, whatever the covering note calls it.
No: You are buying effort and judgement over a period. Budget it that way.
Would coverage without a link be acceptable?
Yes: The story is the point, and the link is a by-product. That is PR.
No: The link was always the point. Price and describe it as a placement.
The grey area
The vocabulary that exists to blur the line
Most confusion in this market is deliberate. A vocabulary has grown up whose main function is to make a purchased link sound like an editorial one, and it works because each term is technically descriptive of something. A link insert is genuinely an insertion. A niche edit is genuinely an edit. Neither phrase mentions the payment, which is the only fact that determines what the transaction is.
Syndicated press releases sit in a related category. Distributing a release across a wire network places identical text on many sites at once, and the links inside it were placed by you rather than chosen by anybody. Wire distribution can be a legitimate corporate communications tool for announcements that genuinely need broad, simultaneous distribution. It is not a source of editorial citations and should not be reported as one.
Then there is the hybrid proposal, which is the most expensive version of the confusion. It offers a monthly PR fee with a minimum number of links attached. The two halves cannot both be true: if the links are guaranteed, they are not earned, and the guarantee will be met by buying placements in the months the earned work does not land. You end up paying campaign prices for placement risk, and the reporting will not distinguish the two.
Where buyers lose money
Four mistakes made at the point of purchase
Each of these is made by competent people, and all four happen before any work starts.
- The two objectives were argued for in one line of the proposal.
- Authority and audience are different purchases with different success conditions. Bundled into one figure, neither can be judged: coverage with no links looks like failure to the search team, and links from sites nobody reads look like failure to the brand team. Split them into two lines with two definitions of success and the whole argument disappears.
- Suppliers were compared on cost per link.
- The moment a spreadsheet has a cost-per-link column, the tender is decided in favour of whoever buys placements, because earned work cannot compete on a metric it cannot promise. If you want earned coverage, the comparison has to be on the story, the people and the track record, not on unit economics only one of the models can produce.
- Nobody asked what happens in a month that produces nothing.
- Earned work has empty months. That is not a supplier failing; it is the nature of the thing. But it needs discussing before it happens, because an unprepared client treats the first empty month as a breach and an unprepared supplier fills it by buying something. Agree in advance what an acceptable quarter looks like.
- The output was never inspected, only counted.
- A monthly link count tells you almost nothing. Open five of the pages. Would a person read them? Does the site have an actual audience? Does the sentence containing your link make sense in context? Ten minutes of reading tells you more about what you bought than a year of dashboards.
Our position
How we scope and report these two
What we do
- Say on the first page of a proposal which of the two the work is, and price it accordingly.
- Report coverage and links as separate lines, including coverage that carried no link at all.
- Price earned work by campaign and period, never by the link, because the output is not ours to promise.
- Agree in advance what an acceptable quarter looks like, including the possibility of a month with nothing in it.
- Qualify any link that was paid for, and tell you when a placement is the honest description of something.
- Hand over the contact list and the assets, so the programme is transferable rather than dependent on us.
What we will not do
- Guarantee coverage, publications, link counts or ranking outcomes from either approach.
- Sell a monthly fee with a minimum link count attached, because the two halves cannot both be honest.
- Buy link inserts, niche edits or advertorials that pass ranking credit on your behalf.
- Count syndicated press release links as earned coverage in a report.
- Pitch a story we would not be content to see published without a link in it.
Translation
Proposal vocabulary, translated
If a proposal uses one of these terms, this is what it describes. None is inherently dishonest; several are used precisely because they sound neutral.
- Link insert or niche edit: paying for a link to be added to an existing article on somebody else’s site. A purchased link that passes ranking credit.
- Contextual link: a link inside body text rather than in a footer or sidebar. It describes position on the page and says nothing at all about how the link was obtained.
- Guest post opportunity, sold with a fee to the host: paying a site to publish an article containing your links. The article does not change what the payment is for.
- Placement: usually accurate, and worth noticing when it appears. It signals that somebody decided to publish because of an arrangement rather than because of the material.
- Authority target expressed as a third-party score: a supplier selecting inventory by a vendor metric. It describes the shopping list, not the editorial merit of anything on it.
- Wire or syndicated release: identical text distributed to many sites at once, with links you placed yourself. Useful for announcements, not evidence of editorial interest.
- Journalist request platform: responding to reporters who have asked for sources. Genuinely earned, competitive, and dependent entirely on answering fast and saying something specific.
- Brand mention: your name in an article without a link. Worth having and worth reporting honestly, but not the thing an authority argument rests on.
Questions
What buyers ask when both proposals are on the table
Is digital PR just link building with a bigger invoice?
No, and the difference is factual rather than stylistic. In digital PR the decision to publish belongs to an editor who owes you nothing, which is why nobody can promise you the outcome. In link building as it is commonly sold, the decision belongs to whoever was paid.
That single difference produces everything else: the pricing model, the risk profile, the reporting, and what happens when a month goes badly. It is also the reason the two should not appear on the same line of a proposal.
If PR cannot promise links, how do we budget for it?
The same way you budget for anything with uncertain output: by the input, over a period long enough for variance to average out, with a defined stop point. A campaign fee for a quarter, with agreed activity and an honest review at the end.
What you should not accept is a hybrid — a PR fee with a link guarantee attached. The guarantee can only be met by buying placements when the earned work does not land, which means you are paying PR prices for the risk profile of bought links.
What is a link insert or a niche edit?
Paying for a link to be added to an article that already exists on somebody else’s site. It is popular because it is cheap and fast, and because the resulting link looks contextual.
It is a purchased link that passes ranking credit, which is the transaction the spam policies describe. The age of the host article does not change what the transaction is.
Does coverage without a link have any value?
Yes, and it should be valued honestly rather than counted as a near miss. Coverage puts you in front of an audience, contributes to what is said about your business, and is read by people deciding whether to trust you.
The problem is only ever one of expectation. If the entire case for the spend was authority and the output is unlinked mentions, the spend did not do what it was sold as doing, and that conversation is much easier if both objectives were priced separately at the start.
Our competitors buy placements openly. Why should we not?
Because you would be taking on a liability whose size you cannot measure and whose timing you do not choose. That is a financing decision dressed as a marketing one, and it deserves to be described that way to whoever signs it off.
It is also worth being honest that competitors doing it may be seeing results today. The question is not whether it works now. It is whether you want a position that depends on it continuing to work, held together by a supplier you would have to keep paying to maintain it.
Send us the proposal and we will tell you which one it is
This takes about fifteen minutes and does not require you to work with us. If the offer in front of you is sound we will say so, and if it is a placement programme with a PR cover note we will show you the lines that give it away.
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