Blogo Team
How to Cite Sources in B2B Blog Posts
Which statements need a source, what counts as a good one for an industrial topic, where the link goes, and what to do with a figure you cannot trace.
Cite a source for every statement a buyer could check and you did not produce yourself: numbers, standards, regulations, test methods, and anything about another company. Link the few words that name the fact, in the same sentence, to the organisation that originally published it. If you cannot find that organisation's page, take the figure out or say plainly that it is your own measurement.
Which statements need a source
Sort every sentence in a draft into one of four groups.
| The sentence states | Example | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| A fact from outside your company | A limit set by a regulation, a test defined in a standard, a property of a material grade | A link to the body that published it |
| A fact about your own product or process | Your tolerance, your lead time, your test result | No external link. Say that it is yours, and give the conditions |
| Something any practitioner in the trade knows | Stainless steel resists corrosion better than plain carbon steel | Nothing, as long as you attach no number to it |
| Your opinion or recommendation | "For outdoor use we would choose the coated version" | Nothing. Word it as a recommendation, not as a fact |
The quick test for the first group: if the sentence contains a number, a standard designation, a legal requirement, a date, or the name of another organisation, and you did not generate it in your own factory, it needs a source.
The second group is where manufacturers undersell themselves. "Wall thickness is held to within the tolerance on the drawing, checked on every batch with an ultrasonic gauge" needs no citation, because you are the source. It only needs to be true, and to be confirmed by the person who runs that check.
What counts as a good source for an industrial topic
Prefer the organisation that created the fact over anyone who repeats it.
| Rank | Source | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The standards body that publishes the standard | Designation, edition, scope, test method names |
| 1 | The regulator or the official legal text | Restricted substances, labelling duties, market-access requirements |
| 1 | The material or component maker's own datasheet | Properties of a named grade or part |
| 1 | Your own test report or production record | Anything about your product |
| 2 | A government statistics office or a recognised trade association | Market and trade figures, with the year |
| 3 | A trade magazine reporting on one of the above | Only as a pointer. Follow it to the original and cite that |
| Do not use | Another supplier's blog, a content site with no named origin for its numbers, an AI answer | Nothing |
Three practical notes.
When the full text of a standard is sold, not published free, link to the standards body's own catalogue page for it and give the designation and edition in your sentence. A reader can see that the document exists and which version you mean. Do not link to an unofficial copy.
Datasheets belong to a grade and a revision. Cite the datasheet for the exact grade you use, from its maker, and note the revision or date. A value for a similar grade from a different maker is not a source for yours.
Another supplier's page is rarely the right source, even when it is accurate, because it is one step removed from the original. Whether to link to competitors at all is a separate decision, covered in our post on linking to other suppliers.
Where the link goes
Put the link on the words that name the fact, in the sentence that states it.
- Good: "The migration limits come from the regulator's plastics regulation, which sets them per substance." The bold words carry the link.
- Weak: "Migration limits are set per substance. Source." The link text tells the reader nothing.
- Bad: a list of ten URLs under "References" at the bottom, with nothing in the text pointing to them.
Google's link best practices describe good anchor text as descriptive and reasonably concise, and give "click here" and "read more" as examples of text that is too generic. The same page says external links can help establish trustworthiness, with citing your sources as the example. It also says to use nofollow only when you do not trust the source, not on every external link. Google's page on qualifying outbound links adds that a regular link needs no rel attribute, and that paid placements should be marked sponsored.
So an ordinary citation of a standards body is a plain link. A link somebody paid you to place is not a citation and has to be marked.
Two more habits help readers:
- Link to the specific page, not the organisation's home page. If the fact is in a long PDF, name the section or table in your sentence.
- Give the year in the text when the fact can go out of date: "the 2024 edition", "(2023 figures)". The reader should not have to open the link to learn how old it is.
A figure you cannot source
Sooner or later a draft contains a number everyone repeats and nobody can trace. Work down this list and stop at the first step that applies.
- Follow the chain. Open the page where you found it and look for where that page got it. Repeat until you reach the original or the trail ends.
- If you reach the original, read it. Check the year, what was measured, and whether it says what the draft says. Correct your sentence to match the source.
- If the trail ends, ask whether you can measure it yourself. A figure from your own production, labelled as yours with the conditions, is stronger than a borrowed one.
- If not, remove the number and keep the point. "Thicker walls generally cost more in material and cycle time" is true without a percentage.
- Do not hedge it into the text. "Reportedly" and "studies suggest" do not turn an untraceable number into a fact.
Blogo applies the same rule to its own drafts. A figure has to appear either in an answer you gave or on the page linked in the same sentence, and a figure that fails that check is stated without the number or cut. The help page on numbers and sources describes the check.
Dead and outdated links
A citation that worked on the day you published can fail later in two different ways.
The link is dead. The page returns an error or redirects to a home page. Find the new location on the same organisation's site and update the link. If the document was withdrawn, the sentence that relied on it now has no source, so go back to the list in the previous section.
The link works and the fact is out of date. The standard has a new edition, the regulation was amended, the datasheet was revised. This is worse, because nothing looks broken. Read the current version and update your sentence, not only the URL.
A routine that fits a small team:
- Keep one spreadsheet with a row per external link: the post, the sentence, the URL, the source's date or edition, and the date you last opened it.
- Twice a year, open every link in the posts that bring you visits or enquiries. Start with those and leave the rest for later.
- When you learn that a standard or regulation in your field has changed, search the spreadsheet for it and fix every post that cites it in one sitting.
- When you change a sentence because its source changed, update the post's visible date. Google's helpful content guidance warns against changing dates when the content has not substantially changed. A corrected fact is a real change. A new date with nothing else altered is not.
What a tool can check
Blogo runs a comparable pass before it hands over a draft: each factual statement is compared with the sources gathered for the article, and the links in the finished draft are checked. Your own review is still the last step, because only you can confirm the facts that come from your factory.