Is it OK to demand links from a reporter?

PR pros are trying to squeeze their clients some SEO juice by asking for backlinks to webpages featuring their content—but many journalists say the practice can rub the wrong way.

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Just how hard should a PR pro push to get a backlink to a client’s webpage?

A run-in with one PR pro sent Digiday’s Lara O’Reilly to Twitter to ask about a practice that is more and more common these days: asking for a link to your webpage.

I was just refused an interview because I declined to include a link to their company website in the article we publish. They told me some major news outlets *do* grant this. (I checked the outlets the company mentioned — and they had.) Is this more common than I thought?

— Lara O'Reilly (@larakiara) August 4, 2020

And no, I'm not going to name any names. Just wanted to get a sense of whether this was becoming more common practice than I had realised.

— Lara O'Reilly (@larakiara) August 4, 2020

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