Link Building for Two-Sided Marketplaces

Two-sided marketplaces — connecting buyers and sellers of anything from services to property — have particular SEO challenges: huge numbers of listing pages, fast-changing inventory and two distinct audiences to serve at once. Link building here is less about volume and more about pointing links at the small set of pages durable enough to be worth linking to.

Where links should point

• Category and location hubs — durable pages that aggregate listings and stay relevant as individual listings come and go.
• Guides for both buyers and sellers that answer real questions (buying guides).
• Not individual listings, which expire and turn any link pointed at them into a dead end (real estate example).

Earned links from the platform itself

Platform data

Anonymised, aggregated trends in prices and demand make genuinely interesting stories for business and consumer press, precisely because a marketplace sees transaction volume no single seller does (data campaigns).

Seller profiles

Sellers often link to their own profile pages from personal sites and social media, which is a free, ongoing source of links a marketplace doesn’t have to actively pursue — as long as profile URLs are stable and worth linking to.

Badges and reviews

Genuine seller achievements — verified status, top-rated badges — that sellers proudly display on their own sites, provided the underlying achievement is real and not simply granted to anyone who pays for a listing.

A worked example

A services marketplace publishes an anonymised annual report on average project pricing by category and region, timed for release alongside a relevant industry event. Trade press covers the pricing trends specifically because the marketplace’s transaction volume makes the data more credible than a single firm’s estimate; separately, a subset of top-rated sellers link to their marketplace profile from their own portfolio sites once the annual badge is announced, adding a slow trickle of links unrelated to the PR campaign.

Controlling thin and duplicate pages

Marketplaces generate huge numbers of filter combinations and thin listing pages almost automatically. Noindex low-value variants and keep only substantive, well-populated pages indexable (faceted navigation, index bloat) — a link pointed at a page search engines have deprioritised does little good regardless of its source.

Serve both sides of the marketplace

Content for sellers — how to succeed on the platform, pricing benchmarks, dispute resolution guides — earns links from a different set of sources than content for buyers. Building both roughly doubles the realistic link opportunities available, since seller-focused content tends to get picked up by business and trade press while buyer-focused content earns links from consumer guides and comparison sites.

Common mistakes

Mistake	Better approach
Pitching links to individual listing pages	Point external links at category hubs and guides instead
Publishing raw, unfiltered platform data	Aggregate and anonymise, with a stated methodology
Ignoring seller-side content entirely	Build a parallel content track for sellers, not just buyers

Common mistakes to avoid

• Pitching journalists on individual listings rather than the durable hub pages behind them.
• Publishing raw internal figures without aggregation or a stated methodology, which invites scrutiny rather than citations.
• Building content only for buyers and ignoring the seller side, which usually has its own distinct set of publishers willing to link.

Measuring what matters

Track referring domains at the hub and guide level specifically, separate from the marketplace’s overall link count, since that’s the layer actually capable of holding onto links over time (referring domains vs backlinks). A rising count of thin, low-value listing-page links is a much weaker signal than a smaller number pointing at durable hubs. It’s also worth tracking seller-side content separately from buyer-side content, since the two tend to earn links from entirely different sources and a single combined metric can hide which side of the marketplace actually needs more investment. Reviewing both halves separately each quarter usually reveals a clear imbalance worth correcting, since most marketplaces default to over-investing in buyer content simply because it feels closer to revenue.

Working with sellers directly

Top sellers on a marketplace often have their own audiences worth tapping for co-marketing: a joint case study, a shared data point about their category, or simply an invitation to contribute expert commentary to a buyer guide. This turns some of the platform’s best sellers into willing partners rather than passive listers, and their own promotion of the collaboration is a link source a marketplace rarely has to actively chase.

Where to go next

Audit your indexable pages first (technical SEO before links) so link equity flows to pages that will still exist next quarter, then pick one dataset from your own transaction history to pitch as a standalone story. Compare listing options on https://successtoroad.com/marketplace/ once you know which categories and price points fit your outreach budget, and review the how it works page for how placements are vetted.

Frequently asked questions