Links on the Internet form a relationship between pages and sites that are hugely important to both search engines and marketers. Search engines, like Google, use links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher's query.
If you are new to link building, we highly recommend starting out with our Beginner’s Guide to SEO with Growing Popularity and Links.
While link building can be hugely beneficial for SEO, it's important to stay up-to-date on the latest practices. Below you'll find the most recent posts from the Moz Blog. In addition, we've selected a few quality resources that deserve particular attention.
The Beginner's Guide to Link Building : Everything you need to get started with link building.
The Professional’s Guide to SEO : Professional’s guide to link building and link earning tactics written by SEO expert Paddy Moogan.
Link Building Tactics : There are lots of ways to get links. This guide shows you tactics applicable to almost all websites.
The Rules of Link Building : You need links, but building bad ones can mean trouble. You need to know the rules!
Link Building: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Learn the basics of link building for absolute beginners, all in 10 minutes!
A new black-hat tactic is threatening to malign SEO professionals and seriously damage companies’ search engine rankings. This is the step-by-step description of the black hat SEO tactic that can reverse good links that took you years to build:
I will walk you through on how to conduct a backlink profile analysis using backlink exports from Open Site Explorer, Link Detective, and the amazing power of Excel.
Most link profiles include a majority of links earned from blogs. Especially given the recent controversy surrounding guest blogging, it's wise to diversify that portfolio, and this post shows you many ways to do so.
This step-by-step guide aims to help users with the link auditing process relying on own judgment, without blindly relying on automation. Because links are still a very important ranking factor, link audits should be carried out by experienced link auditors rather than third party automated services. A flawed link audit can have detrimental implications.
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With Google crushing the SEO schemes and easy tactics one by one via manual and algorithmic penalties, I believe that the time for SEOs to embrace new technologies and pay for content promotion and audience engagement is upon us.
Have you had a manual unnatural links penalty removed? Have you done a thorough Penguin link cleanup? Here's what you can expect to see in regards to traffic once your site is no longer penalized.
I entered SEO as a link builder. Fast forward four years: I now solely create visually engaging content in an effort to scale link building. One thing I've learned is that not all business models support community building as a goal.
The entire online marketing industry is still up in arms after Matt Cutts's post on his blog title: The Decay and Fall of Guest Blogging for SEO. Guest Blogging was one of the last horizons that people considered safe for “White Hat” link building. So what now? Is guest blogging truly dead?
One day in my inbox I found the dreaded notice from Google that our client had a site-wide manual penalty for unnatural inbound links. We quickly set up a call and went through the tooth-rattling ordeal of explaining to our client that they weren’t even ranked for their brand name. Organic traffic dropped by a whopping 94% - and that for a website that gets 66% of its traffic from Google-based organic search.
This article was inspired by Geoff Livingston’s poignant post “8 Myths of the Zombie Content Apocalypse," published on copyblogger as a reaction to the recent buzz around a phenomenon called “content shock.” It’s a principle that introduces basic economics to content marketing — there are only so many eyeballs, and they can consume only so much content. What’s ironic is that there is a real relationship between the content shock concept and the pervasiveness of scaled guest blogging for links.
Never fear the nofollow. Here's a breakdown on why this once-cursed link type should now be a part of your overall online marketing strategy.
As someone who has overseen link removal campaigns, I am not down on link removals. They have a place, and I've seen positive effects from cutting out large chunks of really bad links (porn, pills, poker, you name it). But, I also believe there are good and bad ways to remove links, and I want to make an example here.
The best ideas for "building links" seldom arrive whilst you sit there thinking of ways you can build links. This post shows you how to develop content assets that'll keep them rolling in.
Over the years, I've seen hundreds of thousands of backlinks while analyzing for opportunities (as well as looking for bad links to disavow or prune). Most recently my analyses have inspired me to write this post because common opportunities continue to reveal themselves, and they're worth sharing.