- UK’s biggest linking national travel section revealed
- Which national newspapers refuse to hyperlink
The linking policies of UK national travel press vary widely with some big-brand newspapers refusing to include hyperlinks to companies they have covered in articles.
4 benefits to online press coverage
In a perfect world online coverage on a newspaper’s website is useful in several ways:
- builds awareness with their online readers
- acts like an independent thumbs-up from the reviewer
- drives traffic to your website via a hyperlink from the article over a long period of time
- boosts your own website’s search engine ranking with a valuable incoming link
Yet not all newspapers link back to the travel companies they write about, seriously impacting the benefit of points 3 and 4.
Which travel press gives the most links?
In nine articles posted to DailMail.co.uk/travel on 22 and 23 October, there were only two hyperlinks to company websites but 58 url mentions with no hyperlink.
Contrast this to Guardian.co.uk/travel, which included 146 hyperlinks to company websites in only 11 articles. Other news sites that happily hyperlinked to the travel companies they covered include Times.co.uk/travel (68 hyperlinks in 10 stories), Express.co.uk/travel (84 links, 12 articles), Mirror.co.uk/travel (45 links, 15 articles) and TheSun.co.uk/travel (26 links, 9 articles).
Papers that are less likely to hyperlink from travel articles are ThePeople.co.uk/travel (32 url mentions without links in 10 articles) and Independent.co.uk/travel (16 url mentions in 11 articles).
The travel press link rating chart
This is the full list of hyperlink versus url mentions from the national UK travel press for the weekend of 22 and 23 October:
Make the most of coverage in the online travel press
- Don’t assume you’ll receive a hyperlink in the article, ask the journalist to include one
- Tailor your deals releases to the online travel teams at The Guardian, The Times and The Express. They write round ups with lots of valuable links back to your website so are worth focusing on.
What do you think? Do you receive regular web traffic from online articles?