What Is HARO Link Building?

HARO stood for “Help a Reporter Out” — a service where journalists posted requests for expert quotes, and anyone could pitch a response. If a journalist used your quote, you’d usually get named and, often, linked back to your site. That link is the whole reason SEOs cared about it in the first place.

How the link-building play actually works

A journalist writing about, say, small business marketing posts a query asking for expert input. Dozens of people pitch a two- or three-sentence quote. The journalist picks one or two, publishes the article, and links to the source’s website as attribution. Multiply that across enough pitches and you build a slow trickle of links from real news and industry sites — the kind of link that’s hard to buy and easy to trust.

What changed with Connectively

HARO was acquired and rebranded as Connectively in 2023, and pitch volume from SEOs exploded faster than journalist demand did. Response rates dropped hard — some agencies report needing 50-100 pitches to land a single placement, versus 5-10 a few years earlier. It’s not dead, but it’s no longer the easy win it used to be.

Is it still worth doing?

As a sole strategy, no — the effort-to-link ratio is too poor for most businesses to run it themselves consistently. As one channel inside a broader link building program that also includes guest posts and digital PR, it still produces genuinely high-authority links that pure outreach can’t replicate. We run it as a supplementary channel, not the whole plan — see our guest posting options for the more predictable side of the mix.