{"id":8748,"date":"2021-01-20T14:38:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T14:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.seo-marketing.koeln\/john-mueller-from-google-praises-digital-pr\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T09:33:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:33:26","slug":"john-mueller-from-google-praises-digital-pr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/john-mueller-from-google-praises-digital-pr\/","title":{"rendered":"JOHN MUELLER FROM GOOGLE PRAISES DIGITAL PR"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is digital PR?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n

Digital PR is basically just about building awareness and popularity. The short description of this strategy<\/a> could be formulated as follows: Create something worth linking to and tell others about it.<\/p>\n\n

Why digital PR?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n

This strategy is often used to build links<\/a> to B2B company websites. Back then, you couldn’t use desperate link strategies, such as reciprocal linking to a B2B company page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

So they had to come up with other strategies for building popularity that would not be noticed at the company headquarters. This is basically link building<\/a> with one arm behind your back.<\/p>\n\n

Link strategies that are good enough for an affiliate site are inappropriate for a corporate<\/a> website. So what remains is what some call digital PR.<\/p>\n\n

There is no clear definition of what digital PR actually is. That’s why some definitions found on the internet include everything an affiliate website would do to build links<\/a> – including guest posts.<\/p>\n\n

Obviously, some definitions of digital PR are just another description of low-level link building<\/a>. But it’s not necessarily a re-branding of low-level link building, as John Mueller reflected in a discussion on Twitter.<\/p>\n\n

\"online-shopping-google\"<\/figure>\n\n

John Mueller about digital PR<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n

The discussion in question began with a tweet about the difficulties of recruiting for digital PR.<\/p>\n\n

“So, recruitment for digital PR\/link building is pretty crazy at the moment; but one good thing I think will come is that digital PR salaries will go up. Tech<\/a> SEO was traditionally much better paid (still is), but it’s nice to see digital PR talent being valued.”<\/p>\n\n

John Mueller then spoke about digital PR:<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n

“I love some of the things I see from Digital PR. It’s a shame that it’s often lumped in with spamming links<\/a>. It’s just as important as technical SEO<\/a>, in many cases probably even more important.”<\/p>\n\n

Bill Slawski (@bill_slawski) commented in the Twitter discussion on how Digital PR can be a part of a well thought out SEO strategy<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n

“Digital PR and SEO<\/a> can work very well together. I marvel at people who insist that digital PR is a separate thing and SEO works on its own; because I know how effective they can be when used together.<\/p>\n\n

A campaign<\/a> that uses both can be very effective.”<\/p>\n\n

One person in the discussion wondered whether relevance should be taken into account. My thoughts on this question are that, in general, only relevant sites will link content<\/a> that is useful to them.<\/p>\n\n

Is digital PR just a buzzword?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n

One Yoast developer expressed skepticism about the concept of Digital PR, noting that in some cases it could be a term for buying links<\/a>. He also suggested that a company spending money on PR might be able to unfairly influence Google<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Jono was not the only person who was skeptical about this. The discussion spilled over onto Facebook<\/a>. There, some people commented in their feeds that link builders were springing up and renaming themselves Digital PR.<\/p>\n\n

Nonetheless, it is good to see that some corners of the search marketing industry are starting to open up to a type of marketing<\/a> that is not directly tied to rankings, but rather addresses website growth through activity. This can help a website<\/a> to gain popularity.<\/p>\n\n

It may seem strange to suggest that one way to get a better ranking is to become popular. But Google<\/a> tries to rank websites that people trust and like. This is also partly what expertise, authority and trustworthiness(E-A-T<\/a>) is all about.<\/p>\n\n

So why not step out of the SEO box<\/a> for a moment and at least think about non-SEO ways to make a website popular?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is digital PR? Digital PR is basically just about building awareness and popularity. The short description of this strategy could be formulated as follows: Create something worth linking to and tell others about it. Why digital PR? This strategy is often used to build links to B2B company websites. Back then, you couldn’t use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1824,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seo-blog-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32519,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8748\/revisions\/32519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}