Awards, Badges and Certifications for Links

Awards and certifications can earn links in two very different ways: by winning or earning them, where the awarding body links to you as part of its own listings, or by running your own award and handing out badges to winners who link back. The first is legitimate and can be genuinely valuable. The second is often a link scheme, and it’s worth understanding exactly where the line sits before building any strategy around either.

Entering genuine awards

• Industry awards run by trade publications and professional associations, which usually carry the most credibility within your sector.
• Local business awards, often run by chambers of commerce or regional publications, which double as a local link and press opportunity.
• Product, design and innovation awards relevant to what you actually make or sell.

Winners and shortlisted entries are usually listed on the awarding body’s site with a link, and a win or shortlisting often generates press coverage on top of that listing. Choose awards your own customers would recognise and respect, rather than obscure ones that exist mainly to sell entry fees and trophies — the link value is similar either way, but the reputational value isn’t.

Certifications and memberships

Quality certifications, sustainability schemes and professional body memberships often include a directory listing with a link as part of membership, and these tend to be stable, long-lived links since certifying bodies rarely take pages down — see directory submissions for how to evaluate which directories are actually worth pursuing versus which are just link farms with a certification-shaped wrapper.

Running your own award: where it goes wrong

A common tactic for years was to create a “best of” award in some category, contact a list of businesses, and send winners a badge to display on their site with a link back to the awarding organisation. Search engines have learned to recognise this pattern well: badge links created mainly to generate SEO value are treated the same way as other manipulative link schemes, and keyword-rich anchor text in the badge link makes the pattern even easier to spot.

The distinguishing question is the same one that applies to scholarship link building: would you still run the award if it came with no link at all? A genuine award — independent judging, real published criteria, a process run because it serves your industry rather than your backlink profile — can earn coverage and natural links the same way any other credible recognition does. If the badge link is the actual point of the exercise, it isn’t worth running.

Signs an award programme is a link scheme in disguise

Genuine award	Link-scheme pattern
Judging criteria published and consistent year to year	Criteria vague or absent, winners chosen broadly
Would run with no link required	Badge and link are the explicit ask in the winner email
Recipients cover a genuinely narrow, relevant field	Recipients span unrelated industries just to sell more badges
Anchor text is the brand name or neutral	Anchor text is a commercial keyword

Publicising a real win properly

When you win something legitimate, treat it as a small PR moment rather than just an update to your homepage footer: publish a short news post, tell local and trade press who might cover it, and update your About or credentials page. That coverage, not the awarding body’s own link, is where most of the downstream value actually comes from — see journalist outreach that gets replies for how to pitch local and trade press on a win worth covering.

Combining awards with a wider content plan

A shortlisting or win is also a legitimate hook for a wider digital PR campaign — it gives you a reason to reach out to press you’d otherwise have no news for, and it’s a credibility marker worth folding into future outreach emails as social proof.

Deciding which awards are worth the entry fee

Most credible awards charge something to enter, and that alone isn’t a red flag — running judged competitions costs money. What matters is whether the fee buys a fair, transparent process or simply a place on a “winner” list handed to anyone who pays. Ask how many entrants typically win in a given category, whether judges are named, and whether previous years’ winners are publicly listed with any detail beyond a logo. If a scheme structures itself so that most paying entrants receive some form of award, treat that as a strong signal to skip it, however tempting the badge might look.

Internal certifications and staff credentials

A related and often-overlooked opportunity is staff certifications: when team members earn recognised professional qualifications, the certifying body sometimes maintains a public directory of certified individuals or firms, occasionally with a link. This is a smaller-scale version of the same principle — genuine credentials, earned through real work, that happen to come with a listing, rather than a listing manufactured to look like a credential.

Where to go next

If you’re weighing whether a specific tactic crosses into manipulative territory, link building agency red flags covers several other patterns worth recognising, and linkable assets that earn links on their own is a safer long-term bet than any badge scheme. For placements while you build a genuine reputation, use a marketplace of publisher websites rather than a scheme built around exploiting a directory’s trust.

Frequently asked questions