What methods do big retail brands use to gain backlinks?

Rein3
I worked for a couple big brands. For one that sold clothes, we would make campaigns giving free discounts and we would send news letters about it to the blogs/websites we wanted links from (normally for websites that weren't the main domain, we had around 20 odd domains to work with).
For a travel agency (and the fashion company too), we would simply contact local press every time something happened, anywhere were people go for vacations. We would send the an email offering them an expert or local to talk with. The brand had offices everywhere, we would send an email to the HR branch and they wold give us contacts in the right country.

[deleted]
They pay. I had a media site before that published fashion and lifestyle news. We were paid anywhere between £250-500 per news article specific to various brands, each such article had 1 or 2 backlinks. I'm sure you hear of most of them every week.

reggeabwoy
I work for a big publishing site that also sells stuff, at some point you pick up links organically. You create links by doing Public Relations (PR), advertising campaigns also yield links, giveaways, promotions, free stuff, discounts, reach out to influential bloggers ect.
Have a rollodex of people at different media sites and maintain relationships with them.
NirvanaServices
There are three methods to Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the one most used – business – backlinks, press releases, social media (does not directly drive sales); technical – used by the enterprises who have special hosting environments (Amazon), product onboarding tools and worldwide dynamic pricing (Net-A-Porter) that Google loves; a combination of the two which is what most large online do.
What is the percentage of business/technical, that depends on the company and whether they are employee centric such as Walmart or automation centric such as ASOS and Amazon. Amazon have a 4% of revenue marketing figures, the larger brands up to 8% or more.
Boohoo is a business centric company investing in employees, Asos is automation centric similar to Amazon. It doesn't matter the value of the product, you have every combination of everything. The business centric companies will have armies of writers, bloggers, press releases and content networks.
So we use a 95%/5% technical/business approach to kick things off, a division just launched a demo store on a 5node hosting cluster (the 95% technical side), with one seed tweet and one Google Webmaster entry (the 5% business side). Google indexed 31% of a new domain in 48hrs from zero, it was based on Magento ecommerce.
All startups use the time approach, but doing that is the "exponential curve" for growth. It is why incubators throw money at a startup with the right technology, they know that if it takes off it goes vertical and can gain traction instantly. The people who designed the architecture we use (we concentrate on Small and Medium Businesses (SMB)s but it was designed for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME)s and Large Enterprises (LE)s) did so based on competing against Asos and Amazon.
It goes that they launched a proof of concept on the architecture with 10,000s products (fashion) and within 6weeks the same products were listing next to Hugo Boss, Selfridges, Saks, Prada with seed tweets only. The other thing you have to remember is Adwords, big business throw money at that as it is such a small percentage of marketing they can pay $2-5/click, a small business has no chance. It is very rare you can make a return on investment with Adwords.
The simple conclusion is that business centric will invest time with employees, agencies and contractors to generate the backlinks (you go to the customers), and automation will invest money for technology so third party sites will write about you creating backlinks (customers come to you), it's a different approach to the same end goal but automation can only get you to 95%. You still need to produce content, the only question is how much to generate the traffic – the more employee centric the business the more you produce.

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