Digital PR is the work of getting a site covered by people who have an audience: journalists, publishers, bloggers and communities. A link often comes with the coverage, and a link is a signal Google uses. That is exactly why the practice sits close to a line in Google’s policies. This article sets out what Google says about promotion, which arrangements it names as link spam and how it tells you to label links that were paid for. It does not describe how to run a campaign; it describes the boundary a campaign has to respect.
What Google says about promoting a site
The SEO starter guide has a section called Promote your website. It says effective promotion leads to faster discovery by people interested in the subject and by search engines, and it lists ways to do it: social media, community engagement, advertising online and offline, and word of mouth. It calls word of mouth one of the most effective and lasting methods, notes that it takes time and usually needs effort elsewhere first, and suggests practical steps such as printing the site’s address on business cards and sending newsletters to people who have agreed to receive them.
It also sets a limit in plain terms. You can overdo promotion: people may become fatigued, and search engines may perceive some practices as manipulation of search results. Nothing in that section tells anyone to build links. Promotion is described as something that earns attention first.
The same links, described as a signal
Google’s page on link best practices says Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. That sentence explains why link-related practices attract a policy. If a link is evidence that someone found a page worth pointing to, then a link created for the sake of looking like that evidence is an attempt to manufacture the signal.
The practices Google names as link spam
The link spam section of Google’s spam policies defines link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings. Several of its examples describe arrangements common in PR:
- Gifting for a link. Sending someone a product in exchange for writing about it and including a link.
- Paid features. Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links passing ranking credit.
- Optimised anchors in distributed content. Links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites.
- Link requirements. Requiring a link as part of terms or a contract without letting the content owner choose to qualify it.
- Low-value content created to manipulate. Content made primarily for linking and ranking signals.
The wording is about purpose and ranking credit. It does not say that a product should never be sent to a reviewer, or that press releases are forbidden. It says that when a link is the point, and it passes ranking credit, the arrangement is a problem.
A short test for any offer of coverage
Reading the policy’s examples as questions gives a usable check, though the wording is Google’s and the questions are ours. Is a product, payment or favour changing hands in return for a link? Does the arrangement require a link, and can the publisher choose to qualify it? Is the anchor text a keyword phrase, or a natural description? Will the same text be republished across other sites? Would the coverage make sense to a reader with the link removed? A yes to the first four, or a no to the last, is a reason to stop and look again. Google also lists excessive link exchanges, automated link creation and forum comments with optimised links as examples, which is a reminder that the policy covers more than outreach.
How Google says to label paid links
The policy is not hostile to advertising. Google says it understands that buying and selling links is a normal part of the web economy for advertising and sponsorship, and that such links are not a violation as long as they are qualified with a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute on the anchor element. The link best practices page repeats the point: if you were paid in some way for a link, qualify it with sponsored or nofollow, and add ugc or nofollow where users can insert links on your site. It also says nofollow is for sources you do not trust, and should not be applied to every external link on a site.
For anyone working with publishers, that gives a sensible question to ask about every placement: was anything of value exchanged, and if so is the link labelled the way Google describes? Our article on what an outbound link vouches for looks at the same attributes from the publisher’s side.
What the documentation does not give you
None of these pages offers a number: no target count of links, no list of approved publications and no promise that coverage will lift rankings. The starter guide goes the other way and says PageRank is one of many ranking signals and that there is much more to Google Search than links. A plan that treats links as the goal is working against the framing in Google’s own pages. Our article on link building and the spam policies sets out the wider policy.
Where this fits at Cultured Digital: digital PR
Cultured Digital’s Authority and Link Building service is described on the site as relevant editorial links through digital PR, content and relationships, with no packages and no quotas. The digital PR guide explains that part of the work, and the analysis-first guide covers competitor backlink analysis and link gap analysis, the work that comes before outreach. The site also states that we do not promise rankings or traffic numbers, which is consistent with the absence of any such promise in Google’s pages. Link Signals, our outbound link checker, reads every outbound link on a website and flags links that no longer belong.