Glossary /Authority & off-page
Digital PR
Earning coverage and links from publications by giving journalists something genuinely worth writing about.
Digital PR is link acquisition through editorial coverage rather than outreach for its own sake. The unit of work is a story — original data, a survey, a tool, a defensible position on something the field is arguing about — offered to writers who cover that field.
It has largely displaced traditional link building because it survives contact with the engines’ guidelines. A link inside a piece a journalist chose to write is exactly the editorial endorsement the ranking system is trying to measure, whereas a link bought or swapped is the thing it is trying to discount.
Its second payoff has become as valuable as the first. Coverage in sources that assistants draw on is how a company becomes something they will cite, and unlike a ranking that can be recalculated overnight, a body of independent coverage compounds.