How to turn unlinked brand mentions into links

Find pages that name your brand without linking, and ask for the link.

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low
Filed under
SEO
Updated

An unlinked brand mention is a page that names your company, product or founder but does not link to your site. Converting mentions to links means finding those pages and asking the author to add the link. It works best when the page is relevant, gets real traffic, and a link would help the reader find you. Some authors leave mentions unlinked on purpose, so expect plenty of no-replies.

How to do it

  1. Search for your brand name, product names and founder names, excluding your own site. In Ahrefs Content Explorer, search the brand and append -site:yourdomain.com. The free alternative is Google Alerts, which emails you when new results match a phrase.
  2. Filter for pages worth the effort. Ahrefs' own guide filtered for sites with a Domain Rating of 30 or more and pages with at least 50 organic visits a month. A mention on a page nobody reads is not worth an email.
  3. Find which pages really lack your link. Content Explorer has a "highlight unlinked mentions" feature, but it works at domain level: it highlights sites that have never linked to you. Ahrefs' guide says that many pages on those domains already link to you, so it also crawls the exported URLs with Screaming Frog and its "Does not contain" custom filter to find the pages with no link to your domain.
  4. Open each page and check that the mention is about you, is positive or neutral, and that a link would help readers. Skip mentions in a negative or comparison context.
  5. Write a short, personal message to the author or editor. Quote the sentence, say which URL the link should go to, and say why it helps their readers (for example, it lets them find the product). If you spot a typo or a broken link on the page, mention it. Ahrefs suggests this makes the author more willing to edit.
  6. Repeat on a schedule. New mentions appear all the time, especially after launches and press.

Examples

Ahrefs checking its own brand. In its guide to unlinked mentions (last updated Nov 20, 2020), Ahrefs searched Content Explorer for "Ahrefs" and found more than 15,000 mentions. After filtering for English pages on sites with DR 30 or higher and at least 50 organic visits a month, 558 pages remained. A crawl of those 558 URLs found 164 with no link to ahrefs.com, about 29%. That is one company's check on its own name, so the share for your brand will differ.

Ahrefs and the Storehacks blog. The same guide shows an outreach email used to turn an unlinked mention of Ahrefs' Tim Soulo on the Storehacks blog into a link. The email gave a reason the link would help readers and suggested a small update to the post title. Ahrefs also notes that it pursued another unlinked mention and "had no joy". Plan for a mix of results.

When it backfires

  • Affiliate links are paid links. Offering an affiliate link as an incentive is a commercial arrangement. Google's spam policy lists "Exchanging money for links" among link schemes. Google's link guidance says paid links and advertisements should be marked rel="sponsored" (nofollow also works), which means the link is flagged as paid rather than an editorial vote. If the ranking value of the link is the goal, an affiliate deal works against it.
  • Link swaps. The same Google policy covers "Excessive link exchanges ('Link to me and I'll link to you')". A one-off request is fine. Trading links at scale is not.
  • Low-value asks. Ahrefs gives the example of a mention of Coca-Cola in an article titled "Why Coca Cola and Pepsi Are Bad For Your Teeth". Adding a link there serves no reader, so do not ask.
  • Pushing too hard. One polite follow-up is enough. If the author has left it unlinked on purpose, such as a style rule that bans outbound links, accept it.
  • Templates. Pasted mass emails get deleted. Personalize each one.

Questions people ask

How do I find unlinked mentions in Ahrefs? Search your brand in Content Explorer, exclude your own domain, filter by Domain Rating and traffic, then use "highlight unlinked mentions" and check pages that remain.

Do brand mentions help SEO even without a link? There is no public data showing how much Google values unlinked mentions on their own. The reliable gain from this tactic is a link you can see, plus referral clicks from readers.

Sources

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