Most programmes answer this implicitly. Links go wherever the content team happens to have published something linkable, which is usually the blog, which is usually not where the money is.
The decision deserves an explicit answer, because pointing acquisition at the wrong URL for a year is one of the few mistakes in this discipline that cannot be recovered by spending more.
The four candidates
| Target | Earns links naturally? | Converts? |
|---|---|---|
| Category / solution page | Almost never | Yes |
| Blog posts | Yes | Rarely |
| Free tools, templates, benchmarks | Yes | Frequently, in PLG |
| Homepage | Sometimes, from brand mentions | Indirectly |
The asymmetry in the first two rows is the whole problem. Pages that earn links do not earn money; pages that earn money do not earn links. Bridging that gap is most of what a link building programme is for.
Two bridges exist. Acquisition — earning links to the commercial page directly, which requires giving publishers a reason. And architecture — earning links to something citable and routing that authority internally. Most programmes need both and run only one.
The allocation that works
For a sales-led B2B SaaS company with a mapped gap on one category term:
- ~50% to the target commercial page. This is the scoreboard. The gap analysis was run on this URL; closing it is the objective.
- ~25% to supporting content that already ranks for related terms and links onward to the commercial page. Cheaper to acquire and it feeds the target.
- ~15% to linkable assets. Benchmarks and tools, which then distribute authority internally.
- ~10% to the homepage. Mostly arriving naturally from brand mentions and digital PR; not something to pursue deliberately.
For a product-led company, shift it
If conversion happens inside the product rather than through a demo request, the free tool and the template gallery are the commercial pages. Roughly 35% to those, 25% to the category page, the rest as above.
How to tell which case you are in
Two exports, twenty minutes.
List A: your top twenty pages by referring domains.
List B: your top twenty pages by demo requests, signups or revenue.
The overlap tells you what to do.
| Overlap | What it means | Do this |
|---|---|---|
| Under a third | Authority is landing where money is not | Fix internal linking first, then acquire to commercial pages |
| About half | Normal, healthy | Acquire against the gap as planned |
| High, and still not ranking | Not a link problem | Check intent match, page quality, technical |
When the answer is "none of the above"
Search your category term. If positions one to four are all publisher round-ups, alternatives pages and comparison articles rather than vendor pages, the SERP is telling you it does not want a vendor page at all.
Acquiring links to your product page in that situation is fighting the format. The correct response is inclusion in those round-ups — a different workstream, measured on referral demos rather than rank.
This is common in SaaS and it is the single most expensive misdiagnosis we see.
Why pointing everything at the blog fails
It is the default because it is easy — publishers will link to a useful article and will not link to a pricing page. So the programme quietly optimises for what is easy to acquire rather than what needs to rank.
Twelve months later the blog has ninety referring domains, the category page has nineteen, and the category page is what the board is asking about.
The blog is not useless in this picture. It is the intermediate step — but only if the internal links exist to carry the authority onward, and in most sites they do not.
Why pointing everything at the homepage fails
Homepage links are the easiest to acquire, because a mention of your company naturally links to your company. They are also the least targeted: ranking happens at page level, and the homepage passes only a diluted share onward.
A profile that is 70% homepage links describes a company with brand recognition and no page-level strategy. Some homepage acquisition is natural and healthy; making it the plan is not.
The multi-page problem
Most companies want to move four or five pages. At eight to eighteen placements a month, spreading across five targets means three per page — which closes nothing anywhere.
The discipline is sequencing. One target page at a time until its gap is closed, then the next. It feels slower and it finishes sooner, which is the same trade-off as everything else in this discipline.
What to fix before acquiring anything
Three checks on the target page, all of which invalidate the whole programme if they fail:
- Does it match the intent the SERP is rewarding? Compare it to what currently ranks.
- Does it convert the traffic it already gets? Ranking a page that converts at 0.3% is an expensive way to learn the conversion rate.
- Is it reachable from the pages that already hold authority? If it is linked only from the main navigation, fix that first — it takes two weeks and costs nothing.
All three are cheaper to fix than to work around, and all three are usually discovered at month nine rather than week one.