Unlinked mentions: the easiest link you will ever earn

The hard part of earning a link is convincing someone your product belongs on their page. With an unlinked mention that argument is already won. You are asking for a formatting change.

The mention itself already does something: assistants read the pages they retrieve and name the products that appear on them, and people copy a name into a search box. The link adds the direct route and the ranking signal.

Three methods, in the order a founder should try them.

1. 1

   The search operator, monthly

   Search your product name in quotes, excluding your own domain: "yourproduct" -site:yourproduct.com. Read the first three pages of results. Anything that names you and does not link is a candidate.

2. 2

   An alert, running

   Set a standing alert on your product name and on the founder's name. It will bring noise, most of it from scrapers and directories, but it catches the article written the week it appears, which is when the writer still cares about it.

3. 3

   A mentions tool, if you have one

   Backlink indexes and media monitoring tools list mentions with and without links, and let you filter to the ones that never linked. This is the only step that costs money, and it is optional for a small product.

Also search the variants people actually type: the name with a space, the name with the domain suffix, and the founder's name. A product called PingFox gets written as Ping Fox, pingfox.com and "the tool by Marta".

Not all of them. Sort what you find into four piles and only write to the first.

One more filter: would you send a reader to this page. If the answer is no, the link is not worth your name in that person's inbox.

Say thank you, name the exact sentence, ask once. Send it to the author, not to a generic address.

Subject: thanks for the mention in your uptime piece

Hi Marta,

Thanks for including PingFox in your post on uptime monitoring, in the
paragraph about status pages. Could you link the name to pingfox.com so
readers can get to it in one click? Happy either way, and I am around
if you ever want detail on how the checks work.

Thomas

• Quote the location of the mention so they do not have to hunt for it.
• Ask for the link to one page, the one that matches what they described.
• Offer something small and real in return: an answer, a screenshot, a figure. Never money, never a link back as payment.
• Do not follow up more than once. A silent no is still a no.

Sometimes the mention describes you inaccurately: an old price, a feature you dropped, a category you left. That email is more valuable than the link one, and it earns the link on the way.

Write it the same way. Name the sentence, give the correct fact in one line, offer the source. Editors fix errors because errors embarrass them, and they usually add the link while they are in the file.

Worked example. A roundup says your product starts at a price you never charged. You write: the line about pricing is out of date, the current plans are on yourproduct.com/pricing, and the free check needs no card. The correction lands, and the link comes with it.

This tactic scales with how often people write your name, so the real work is upstream.

• Use one spelling of the product name everywhere, including your own pages, so a search for it finds everything.
• Publish something quotable: a figure from your own data, a tool, a clear explanation of a hard thing.
• Answer questions in the communities where your buyers are, under your own name, for months.
• Say yes to podcasts and interviews. Show notes name the product, often without a link, which is this page's whole job.

A monthly hour is the right rhythm: run the search, sort what is new, send three emails, log them. It is the cheapest link work there is, and unlike most of it, the people you write to are glad to hear from you.