Unlinked Mentions: The Definitive Guide To Turning Them Into Backlinks

Unlinked brand mentions are simply when you have mentions of your brand, product or name, which have not been turned into a backlink. They are a natural part of the web, and are still a good positive signal to search engines – it means you’re getting some brand recognition, and have done something noteworthy enough to be mentioned by other websites. But since we are trying to be link builders here – it’s also painful because you didn’t get a link!

Now, brand mentions are nice – but adding a link is the secret sauce that turns a good meal into a feast.

So, here’s some neat ways you can turn those mentions into links, which will help you drive your authority, search engine rankings and subsequently – your organic traffic results.

What is an Unlinked Mention?

Unlinked mentions, as we said, are when websites mention your brand, product/service, or people associated with your brand – but do not give you a link, along with that mention.

Here’s an example of a brand called Teramind, which has been mentioned in an article in the Telegraph, without a link.

If we try to find more unlinked brand mentions for this brand, we’ll then uncover over 3,000+ opportunities. This list of sites can be a potential goldmine of backlinks, if we reach out, and can turn the conversations into our favor.

What you tend to find is that once you are doing a lot of brand building activities, such as digital PR, appearing on industry podcasts, appearing at events – to name just a few – you will naturally pick up links, and a lot of brand mentions through that process.

You might even find unlinked brand mentions occur, as a by-product of other link building tactics like guest posts as well as well.

Do brand mentions have any impact on SEO rankings at all?

Well, according to John Mueller and this episode of Google Office Hours in Dec 2021 (at 44:10) – they simply do not. While at 58:12, there’s an admission that in the same way they cannot use brand mentions as a ranking signal – they also cannot use “spammy” brand mentions, as a signal of any sort to devalue rankings, and its not possible to “disavow” a brand mention in any case.

So why do unlinked mentions occur in the first place?

The exact reason isn’t always going to be known, but the most common issues include:

• Editorial policy: Some websites (especially very authoritative websites) know the value of their site linking out to others, and they just have an internal policy of not linking at all, only giving nofollow links or sparingly giving out links. More commonly seen with large media, top industry blogs,  government websites, or organizations.
• Lack of awareness: You’ll especially see this with small businesses, or small blogs – they just don’t focus enough on SEO or backlinks, to really give it much thought. They may not even be linking out externally much at all, or do so only if they are trying to reference a very specific blog post.

We’ll talk more later about the nuances of what happens when you reach out to websites who fit into either of these 2 scenarios.

Types of Unlinked Brand Mentions

Not every mention will be specifically of your main brand name – there could be other ways that you’ve been mentioned, and each could be a link opportunity.

It could include any of the following ,or a variation of these:

• The name of one of your products or services.
• The name of someone at your company, or one of your brand ambassadors.
• The slogan associated with the brand.
• A quote from your brand, or a brand representative.
• Your logo image ( Often seen on an industry event page of sponsors or partners)
• Common/accidental misspellings of your brand or product name

Example of Unlinked Brand Mention

For example, here’s one instance where something I said on a Majestic podcast, was mentioned by another agency in the SEO space. I didn’t get a link, but there is a hyperlink to the podcast. 

It might be worth asking to get the brand mention changed to a link back to my own agency’s site. Here is another brand mention, this time on the Telegraph, which is a slight misspelling of the brand name, “The Links Guys”. To find more misspelt instances like this, you can use a domain typo generator, and incorporate this into your prospecting process.

Being a top tier media site, it’s not always going to be the case that you can turn this into a link (due to their editorial policy), but, if you have good rapport with the journalist, or its a smaller to moderate authority site – then it’ll be more feasible to try and pursue it.

Having said that, we’ve even managed to get a link placement on a DR 89+ website as well, as shown below, in our outreach email to Marketplace.org where we asked about the unlinked brand mention.

When You Should Not Chase Unlinked Mentions?

When it comes to pursuing unlinked mentions as a tactic, you still want to apply some kind of strategy, so that you’re pursuing opportunities that will lead to links that are impactful, but also are going to be an efficient use of time as well.

• Avoid low quality links / PBNS: You may naturally pick up brand mentions on low quality sites as well, so of course, just ensure you cut out as many of these targets during your prospecting process as possible, so you don’t waste time on these types of links. Filter for decent quality links by setting a baseline domain rating / domain authority.
• Avoid defamatory / negative articles: Goes without saying, but you might not be mentioned in a positive light in some articles. Of course, its always important to look into the root cause of why you’re being talked about in a negative light – but from a link building POV, also avoid reaching out to such websites – unless you have a plan of action on how you’re going to turn it into a positive outcome.
• Lack of feasibility of linking out: There are inherently going to be some sites that will just not link out, no matter how nicely you ask! So if you are getting brand mentions on sites like federal-level government, or very large organizations where they are just linking to you as an official retailer or distributor – and none of the businesses listed get a link… then its unlikely that they’ll link to you, and you’ll just hit a brick wall when you ask.

5 Steps to Find and Convert Unlinked Mentions

Now let’s go into the simple steps you can take to actually run this tactic, and turn those mentions into valuable backlinks.

Step 1 – Find & Extract Unlinked Brand Mentions

The first part to finding relevant mentions, that you can turn into backlink opportunities – is to find the data in the first place, and knowing who you need to reach out to.

This data prospecting part is the most crucial stage – because without it, you won’t find enough online mentions (or enough of the right type), to impact your backlink profile.

There are a few different techniques you can use here.

(a) Using Ahrefs Content Explorer

Ahrefs has a Content Explorer feature, which acts as a mini search-engine. The idea behind using this feature is you can search through the Ahrefs database of URLs, and extract data based on certain filters they have available.

To find unlinked brand mentions, you want to run a search like this

“BrandName” -site:brandname.com -x.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com -instagram.com -tiktok.com -reddit.com -linkedin.com

Essentially how this works, is you’re searching for all instances of your brand name – and using a negative exclusion, to filter out results from your own website and the common social media platforms.

The filter for “highlight unlinked” then allows you to filter further, for the domains which have not linked to your domain – ensuring you can filter out brand mentions which have already linked.

You can also filter out more results, but using filters for metrics like Domain Traffic, Page Traffic, Domain Rating, or even language. I’d usually recommend setting a benchmark like DR 20+, Domain Traffic 500+ and for only the “Live” pages, in order to narrow down results.

You then likely have to manually vet the targets at the end anyway, but these filters should ensure that you’ve trimmed out most of the junk.

(b) Scrape via Google Search

If you don’t have Ahrefs, or just want to ensure to absolutely exhaust the SERPs, and find every opportunity possible – then this where scraping link opportunities from Google will come in.

Similar to Ahrefs Content Explorer, you first want to run a search, and bring up results which contain your brand mentions.

The only issue is that you need a tool which can extract the results in bulk. This is where tools like ScreamingFrog, NetPeak Google SERP, or DataforSEOs’ API, will come in useful – for extracting the SERPs in bulk.

After you have extracted your opportunities, you can then: filter out low metric sites using your SEO metric criteria (such as with Ahrefs batch analysis, and then you can filter out sites which are already hyperlinked, using Scrapebox’s “Free Link Checker” tool.

Or an even simpler method if you just want to check pages which are linked at the domain-level – is to place your exported list of link opportunities in one Google Sheet tab, and then do a Vlookup formula, where it cross checks for matches, against your list of already linked, referring domains.

(c) Reverse Image Search

If you have a lot of unique photography, infographics or your logo has been used in a lot of places – this can also be another source of links.

Simply run a reverse image search, using either Google Image Search, or TinEye.

(d) Check Backlinks of Socials / Other Assets

Another common issue that can happen, is that people link to your socials, instead of your main website. So the fastest way to specifically extract these opportunities, is plug your social profile’s URL into a backlink analysis tool.

Its fairly common with digital PR tactics, or if you’re using reactive “HARO-style” PR platforms, that they may link to the brand representatives social profile instead. In some cases they may change it, but it won’t always be guaranteed.

(e) Find Brand Name Misspellings

We touched on this before, but misspellings of your brand or product name (or other associated entities) could be another opportunity that would otherwise get missed during your usual prospecting process.

A domain typo checker will help you if you tend to have a lot of variations which crop up.

Step 2 – Organize and Sort your Unlinked Mentions

Once you have your raw list of prospects, you then want to refine the lists via SEO metrics.

This might include:

• Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Rating (DR)
• Organic Domain Traffic – using Ahrefs, Semrush or SimilarWeb estimations.
• Trust Flow, Citation Flow and/or Trust Ratio – if you are using Majesitc.
• Link Type – you may be trying to subcategorize based on the type of website, or industry that the unlinked brand mention is from.

This’ll ensure you can cut out link farms, or other junk links – but it would also be wise to keep a human level of vetting as well, especially if you are dealing with a large prospect list.

Step 3 – Collect Contact Details

Your process for collecting the appropriate contact emails won’t be too different to your usual link prospecting process, but there are some nuances to keep in mind for your unlinked brand mentions.

Some link building agencies may opt for using a tool like Hunter.io or Snov – while those will help you collect emails at scale, there’s a higher likelihood a percentage of them will not be the best contact, and you could even end up with a validity issue.

Especially since this is a tactic which may require you to reach out to a lot of sites, you’d be better placed to put a bit more effort into researching the best contact.

Some general rules to keep in mind:

• With medium to larger sized websites, the journalist writing the article – will often be the best contact to reach first. Since they wrote the article they’ll be in the best position to tell you if they can turn it into a link, or if there is an editorial reason why they didn’t hyperlink it.
• Always make sure the contact works there. If the article is written by a freelance writer, or an outside contributor, there won’t be much point trying to reach them, as they won’t be able to edit it anyway. Make sure to collect a contact which is a current, in-house content manager/editor level person.
• Is it easier to ask someone in your network? Rather than go the long route of cold outreach, think about whether there’s someone you can quickly contact, and ask. Maybe you already gave them a link from somewhere else, and you can consider it a link exchange, of sorts.

Step 4  – Craft Effective Outreach Emails

After the prospecting stage, you then want to reach out to the websites/people you collected, and try to convert some of these opportunities, to actual backlinks.

We talk deeper about the art of cold email psychology here, but we’ll summarize some general pointers to keep in mind when you’re doing unlinked mention outreach.

(a) Offer additional value

It may not be enough to just simply reach out and ask them to hyperlink the brand mention. What compelling reason do you have, for them to turn it into a link?

It could be simply offering to do a link exchange, or a reciprocal social media share.

Maybe it’s to ensure that the reader is very clear on which brand they are mentioning (i.e. prevent them confusing it with another similarly named brand), you may have noticed a broken link on their site, or you could even have a very specific study/resource they can hyperlink instead, which would add significant credence to the link’s value for readers. A bit like this example below, which linked to a very specific case study.

(b) Make sure to personalize

The recipients of your link building outreach can tell if it’s a generic email that’s been blasted out to thousands of emails.

So the key to having outreach with a good success rate, is emails which have been personalized, and where you are thinking about what the recipient is likely to care about.

If you can get this right, personalizing your email outreach will maximize your response rates, and also improve your email deliverability. Especially important for unlinked brand mentions, where you may run the risk of being too templated – make sure to make the emails look as unique as possible.

(c) Don’t be overly pushy

Be mindful that the webmasters or editors you’re reaching out to are busy. Make sure you are reaching with a relevant proposition, and you are being useful to them.

There’s nothing worse than a pushy person who keeps reaching out with something that isn’t relevant or isn’t actually taking the time to listen properly – especially when you’re following up, make sure it’s a polite reminder, and try to follow up with further value, rather than being annoying or repetitive.

(d) Organize and streamline the process

Especially when you’re doing link building at scale with a tactic like unlinked mentions, you should make sure you are tracking your outreach with a CRM, or just a simple Google Sheet tracker.

Tools like Pitchbox, can also help you automate or streamline parts of the link building process will come in very handy – enabling you or your team to handle large amounts of targets, without drowning in data.

Step 5 – Monitor & Find More Unlinked Mentions

We’re almost going back to Step 1 again here, but this is also a bit of an endless loop. Once you’ve gone through your unlinked brand mentions, this is something you can repeat again and again, especially if brand building activities are ongoing.

Aside from Google Search scraping or Ahrefs Content Explorer, there are some sophisticated tools you can use to monitor, and find unlinked mentions quickly including:

• Google Alerts
• Mention.com
• Brand24.com
• Semrush’s Brand Monitoring Tool

Google Alerts is not as advanced as the other tools, but the general principle behind it, is similar. Simple plug in the search terms that you want to monitor for, and you’ll be notified when it sees a match.

Is there a Way to Automatically Link All the Unlinked Mentions?

When you are dealing with a large volume of brand mentions, it may seem intuitive to find a way to automate the process heavily.

Here are a few reasons why you cannot automate the process:

• Going back to what we said in the “When You Should Not Chase Unlinked Mentions?” section, not every unlinked mention, is an opportunity worth pursuing. You will inevitably need to have some kind of filtering and vetting system for any link opportunities you have scraped.
• Most of the websites worth pursuing, will require some kind of editorial/vetting process on the part of the webmaster or editor. With the exception of some directory submission systems  – there won’t really be a way of automating the approval process.
• You would be well advised to streamline the outreach process, with segmented email templates and outreach software like Pitchbox or Buzzstream – but I would not recommend fully automate outreach. Not only will it mean your emails are not personalized and too “samey”, but they’ll also be liable to land in spam and cause inbox health issues, because the emails will set off spam filters.

Wrapping Up

Unlinked mentions is one of the best lowest hanging fruit tactics you can use, if you need a quick-start link building method.

Not only can it yield highly relevant, editorially placed links – but it can be one way of gaining links via a Surround Sound SEO-style strategy. It’s not a “one and done” method as well. Its a tactic you can always revisit and go back to later.

So if you’re trying to turn these mentions into meaningful connections – contact our team at TheLinksGuy  – because every unlinked mention is a missed opportunity.