Am I the only one who thought guest posts were the main way to get links?

I was looking at a case study from a big agency last month. They said for a client in the home services niche, over 60% of their quality backlinks came from unlinked brand mentions. They just did outreach asking for a link where the client's company name was already mentioned in an article. I always thought you had to write a whole new guest post to get a link. This was on the agency's own blog, not some shady forum. It makes me wonder if I've been wasting time pitching new content when I could just search for mentions. Has anyone else had success with this link reclamation method?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_oscar21d ago

That 60% number is wild. Makes you wonder how many unlinked mentions are just sitting out there for anyone to find. I bet a lot of smaller sites would be happy to add the link if you just ask nicely.

rubyschmidt13d ago

Yeah I tried that last year. Found about 30 unlinked mentions for my old blog. Sent super short, friendly emails and got links from over half of them. The key was making it zero effort for them, I included the exact sentence with the link already in it so they could just copy paste. Took maybe an hour total for a bunch of easy wins.

the_thomas21d ago

Totally. It's like when you find an old blog post that quotes you but never linked back. Happens all the time. People just forget or don't think about it.