Do Link Insertions in Published Blog Posts Help Your SEO?

One of the most common pieces of advice given to anyone looking to build their website is to spend some time building backlinks.

It makes sense. Backlinks are the framework the internet is built on, and they're the primary mechanism Google uses to determine the overall value and authority of a domain. It goes far, far beyond just the number of backlinks, though, which is why some people spend thousands of dollars a month on links and never make progress, while others get a couple of links for free and shoot up into the big leagues.

I do a lot of link building for my clients, so I've seen a lot of different strategies and how they can work, or not.

One of the most accessible kinds of link building is link insertions into published blog posts. They're often easier to achieve than whole-cloth guest posting or contributions, more reliable than cold outreach, and usually more relevant than blind journalist networking. What are they, specifically, and do they work? If so, how can you do it properly? Let's dig in.

What Are Link Insertions and How Do They Work?

Link insertion is just one name for this strategy. You may have heard of it referred to by names such as contextual link building, link placements, niche edits, and more. It's similar to the moving man method and broken link building, but not quite the same.

The concept is pretty simple.

First, you have a high-quality resource post on your own website. This is something you want to have created, refined, and published already, not something you're going to make for a recipient or other purpose. 

Next, you look for good websites in your niche that have related content. You're looking for pages that have something in common with the page you've created. Maybe they're resource lists, round-up pages, review lists, recommendation lists; it doesn't hugely matter what, specifically, as long as it's relevant and your link would look at home on the page.

Once you've identified and vetted the site, you reach out to the site owner. 

Your pitch will generally be simple: you have this resource page, you'd like to ask them to add it to their page (link included so it's easy for them to find it), and you explain why you'd be a good fit to be on their page. 

You can already see how this is similar to other strategies. 

• If the page you've identified is linking to bad, outdated resources, you recommend yours in replacement; that's the moving man method. 
• If the page you've identified is linking to deleted, missing, or redirected content, you recommend yours in replacement; that's the broken link building method. 
• If neither is the case, and you ask to have yours added to the list, that's link insertions. 
• You can also look for unlinked mentions of your brand and request a link be added, as another similar kind of link insertion. Unlinked mentions (aka implied links) are a tertiary SEO factor, but an explicit link is better.

Now, not a lot of webmasters are going to bite on this strategy on its own. That's why most people who do it (successfully, anyway) do something to sweeten the pot. You might:

• Offer a guest post if the site owner is interested.
• Offer other recommendations for ways they could improve the old post.
• Offer to improve the old post directly, while maintaining their voice and content.

You can also preemptively send some value to the site owner. For example, you might link to their site somewhere on yours, or promote them on social media, without expectations of returns. By having already given them some value, you build a more positive impression of your site and your efforts.

Be careful here; try not to offer 1:1 link exchanges, as these are against Google terms, though organic reciprocal links are fairly difficult for them to detect and punish when you aren't doing a ton of abuse.

And, obviously, you can just offer money. That's technically not against Google's terms (though you do have to disclose it), but you and I both know it happens all the time.

Why Link Insertions are So Good

Do link insertions work? Yes, of course. It's a great strategy when you can get it working. 

First of all, it's fast and easy to implement this kind of strategy. Building a core template for an email that you can customize based on a site's page takes a bit of effort, but it's a matter of minutes to spin out the actual emails, and it's even faster if you use AI to do it. Just make sure to read over the email before you send; if it's obviously AI and is incorrect about something, it will make you look terrible, so always review first.

It's also a strategy that involves relatively minimal effort on your part. Unlike things like broken link building or customized content, you aren't creating fresh content on your site to serve as bait. Unlike guest posting, you aren't creating a whole new piece of content for another site. You're promoting content you already have, on pages that are already indexed. The bar is very low.

On top of that, it has a fast turnaround time when it works. Since the page is already indexed, changes to it are reflected quickly, so your backlinks will be detected and start working for you faster than other backlink-building strategies.

Plus, you have a broader number of sites you can target than you do with other strategies. You aren't going to get a guest post through to a site that never publishes guest content, right? But those sites might be open to minor edits for link insertions, especially when there's secondary value riding along with it.

Are There Drawbacks to Link Insertions?

Yes, of course; it's not a perfect strategy, just like every strategy in marketing.

The biggest drawback is just getting in touch with a site owner in a way that they'll give you the time of day. As a site owner yourself, you likely know how many hundreds of emails you get a month (or week, or day) from marketers offering similar deals, or guest posts, or SEO audits, or whatever else.

You have a pretty significant risk of falling to the spam filter before your offer even reaches an inbox, and if it gets through, you still need to have a compelling subject line to get them to open it, and a compelling offer to get them to take action.

Just because it's less effort than something like guest posting doesn't mean it's easy, after all. 

It can also come across as transparently exploitative if you're trying to target low-traffic, low-ranking old posts that have no real value, or you're asking a site owner to make updates to something they've pivoted away from in recent months or years. You really need to get the right fit.

Speaking of…

How to Find the Right Sites to Target with Link Insertion Offers

If you think link insertion is a promising strategy, great! Now, how do you find sites and content you can target effectively and get value from?

First, you need to pick the right domain. 

You're looking for a website that is relevant to your niche in some way. I wouldn't go to town on link insertions from plumbers or gaming websites or gardening sites or food blogs, since my site isn't about any of those. 

That's because one of the significant weight factors in a backlink's value is the alignment of subject matter. The closer two sites are in terms of subject, the more value a link from one to the other will have. A plumber might link to a pest control site, a pest control site might link to a landscaper, since these are all home improvement sites; none of them should be linking to B2B furniture sales or Online Poker sites or whatever else.

The first round of vetting is a simple visual inspection. Browse the site and get the vibes. Does it look and feel like something with some weight, authority, and value behind it? If you get bad vibes from it, you don't have to target it.

Next, do a bit more technical digging. Do a quick link analysis, check through their blog posts (new and old) and look at the kinds of sites they link to. You can also check how much traffic a website gets to get a better sense of whether it's worth pursuing.

The two main red flags here are:

• Linking only to a small handful of sites. This can indicate you've actually found a member of a PBN, and you probably will be ignored if you try to reach out. Even if you do get your link on the site, it might cost you.
• Linking to everything under the sun. Again, if your pest control company is linking to food blogs, online poker, a digital pharmacy, and other wildly unrelated sites, their backlinks probably don't count for much of anything. A high Moz spam score can be another telltale sign of a low-quality site.

It can also be worth looking for signs of abuse or intrusion. I had one promising site I was about to reach out to, when I found a few small signs that their site had been hacked. I didn't want to add my link alongside abusive spam links, both because it can reflect poorly on me after the fact and because mine could be removed in a rollback down the line, so I left it aside.

After that, do a basic metrics rundown for the site. It doesn't do you a ton of good to get backlinks from sites that only get 100 hits a month and don't rank for much of anything, right? I'm not saying you should exclusively target the top ten sites in your niche (you probably won't have much luck with them anyway), but you need to prioritize your efforts. Since there are likely thousands of sites you can try, you don't need to waste time with the worst 10% of them.

Sculpting Link Opportunities

Once you've identified sites, you need to find the opportunity for your link.

The more content you have on your site, the more possible relevant pages you will have for more sites, so the better off you'll be.

I generally like to pull a top pages report for a site, and find something relevant from that list. It's rarely effective to target the obvious best post, but if there are some older posts that are good but could use a little work, they make for great targets.

If you find unlinked mentions, or even cases where they've linked to you in the past, that's even better. 

The biggest goal is to find cases where the page you're targeting has a section that is deeply relevant to something on your site. The topic of the two posts doesn't need to align, though. What I've found works best is when a blog post offhandedly mentions a topic that isn't part of the core thesis, but would deserve further reading… and then doesn't provide further reading. Adding in that link would be a clear value-add for their post.

Once you have all of this down, you craft your pitch.

What I like to do is write a simple paragraph that they could insert directly into their post. It doesn't have to be much, and it definitely shouldn't be advertorial. Just a sentence or three that expands on a topic and includes a partial-match anchor for your content. Sometimes a branded mention works, but you don't want it to be anywhere close to a call to action, and you don't want a full exact match keyword, since that tends to get a lot of scrutiny.

Above all, you want the link anchor and surrounding text to look natural to the site you're inserting it into. The less natural it feels, the worse the link will reflect on you, and if you get a lot of those around different sites, it looks very unnatural to the search engines. That's when they'll crack down on you and give you an unnatural link penalty.

All that's left is to send your message and hope it lands.

This is where I also like to consider secondary means of contact. Sometimes, I try to network with the site owner on social media or through events. Other times, I might spend a bit of time warming them up with value I send their way before I ask about my own links. Other times I send the cold email and see if it works (and it does, not super often, but more often than you might expect.)

Should a Link Insertion be Flagged?

One question you might have is, does this link need to be called out?

The answer is… maybe.

Technically, any time you ask for a link and someone else adds it, if there's any reciprocation or any value changing hands, it's a form of paid or exchanged link and needs to be either nofollowed or identified in some way.

In practice? No one does this, and it doesn't matter 99% of the time. Google is only going to crack down if they have a reason to, like you're abusing link exchanges across thousands of sites.

Since your main goal is to provide value with your link, not to offer value for the link, you usually are in the clear.

Now, if you're paying for the placement, then you technically need a rel="sponsored" flag as well. Again, does this always happen? Not in the slightest. But if you buy links that don't get flagged, you can get in trouble, so it's best to follow the rules when you can.

Have you ever tried link insertions? If so, how did it go? Let's talk about it in the comments.