The link in the body

The link in the body

Everyone says: "Never put a link in the post body — LinkedIn tanks your reach to keep people on-platform."

The claim: external links trigger a hard reach penalty, so always banish them to comments.

What's actually true: links get LESS reach, but not because of a punishment flag — because click-outs lower dwell and the post does less on-feed work. The mistake is treating "comment trick" as a clean fix; you're still asking people to leave. Tested fix: stop optimizing link placement and optimize link NEED. Put the full value in the post so the link is optional, not the payoff. For the people who do want more, the link works fine in-body when the post already earned 200 reactions of momentum.

It's not the link killing reach. It's that you put the point behind it.