What Is Editorial Link?
Written byFlavio Amiel Founder, Roborank
An editorial link is a backlink that a publisher places voluntarily because they judged the linked page worth citing, with no payment, exchange, or request involved. Also called a natural link, it represents a genuine editorial endorsement of the destination. Google’s ranking systems are built to count editorial links and to discount links created primarily to manipulate search rankings.
- An editorial link is defined by how it was placed: a writer chose to link on merit, rather than being paid, traded, or asked.
- These are the links Google’s algorithms are designed to reward — the opposite of the bought, exchanged, and mass-produced links its spam policy discounts.
- Because nothing was traded, an editorial link carries no
rel="sponsored"orrel="nofollow"obligation and can pass ranking credit. - You cannot directly place an editorial link on someone else’s site; you can only earn it by publishing something worth citing.
- Google’s stated best practice — content that can “naturally gain popularity” — is a description of how editorial links are earned.
How an Editorial Link Works
An editorial link is defined not by what it looks like but by how it came to exist. Two links can point to the same page with identical anchor text and HTML, yet one is editorial and one is not — the difference is whether the publisher placed it freely or was paid, traded, or asked to. That origin is invisible in the markup, which is why search engines spend so much effort inferring it.
The reason the distinction matters is that Google’s entire link-based ranking model rests on treating a link as a vote of confidence. A vote only means something if it was cast freely. So Google’s systems are built to separate links a publisher gave on merit from links someone engineered, counting the former and discounting the latter. Its link spam policy defines the manipulative category — links created “primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings,” including bought links, exchanged links, and mass-produced article links. An editorial link is simply what remains once you subtract all of that: a citation a writer chose to give.
That freely-given nature is also why an editorial link carries no attribute obligation. Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links tells publishers to tag paid links with rel="sponsored" and user-generated or otherwise untrusted links with rel="ugc" or rel="nofollow". None of those apply to an editorial link, because nothing was paid, exchanged, or untrusted about it — which is exactly why it can pass full ranking credit.
Example of an Editorial Link
The cleanest way to define an editorial link is by the boundary Google draws around its opposite. In its spam policies, Google lists the links it will not count: “buying or selling links for ranking purposes,” “excessive link exchanges,” and “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.” Alongside that blocklist, in the same body of guidance and its July 2021 reminder on qualifying links, Google states the constructive alternative — that the best way to get links is to “create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community.”
Set those two statements next to each other and the editorial link is precisely the residual. Everything on the prohibited list involves a link that was arranged — money, a trade, a distributed placement. The recommended path involves a link that was earned — a publisher, unprompted, deciding your content was worth citing. That earned link, and only that link, is editorial. Google never uses the phrase to describe a link you acquired; it uses the entire spam policy to fence such links out.
The lesson for anyone doing link building is uncomfortable but clarifying: you cannot add an editorial link to the web, because the defining act — the publisher’s free choice — is not yours to make. What you can do is change the odds of that choice going your way, by building a linkable asset or earning coverage through digital PR. The link stays the publisher’s decision; your only lever is being worth the citation.
Here’s the distinction I make people sit with: an editorial link is not a type of link you can go acquire — it’s a verdict someone else reached about your page. Every link-building service that promises "editorial links" is selling a contradiction, because the moment money or a request is attached, the link stops being editorial by definition. That’s not a semantic nitpick; it’s exactly the property Google’s systems try to detect. The whole point of the spam policy is to separate links a publisher gave freely from links someone engineered. So the only honest way to "build" editorial links is indirect: make the page so worth citing that the verdict comes back in your favor. You control the input. The link is the other person’s call.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an editorial link?
What is the difference between an editorial link and a paid link?
Can you buy an editorial link?
Do editorial links need to be nofollow?
The Bottom Line
An editorial link is the gold standard of the link graph precisely because you can’t manufacture one: it is another site’s unpaid, unsolicited judgment that your page deserved a citation. That is the exact signal Google’s ranking systems try to isolate and reward, and the exact thing its spam policy exists to protect from imitation. You never place editorial links — you earn the verdict by being worth linking to, then let the publisher make the call.
Sources
- Spam Policies for Google Web Search — Link spam — Google Search Central
- Qualify your outbound links to Google — Google Search Central
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