Link Building

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!

Most Recent Articles on Link Building

Post-Penguin Anchor Text Case Study
Courtney Tuttle

Post-Penguin Anchor Text Case Study

Link Building

It's no secret that Google's Panda and Penguin updates caused a lot of panic. Although I'm pretty turned off to information about these updates, I've been really interested in the anchor text issues surrounding the Penguin update. If sites that have over-optimized anchors lost traffic due to the update, it seems to make sense that sites can move up with relatively few (or without any) anchored links. I wanted to test that idea and decided that it was time for a good, old fashioned case study.

Link Building 101 - The Almost Complete Link Guide (Updated for Post-Penguin)
S

Link Building 101 - The Almost Complete Link Guide (Updated for Post-Penguin)

Link Building

Quite a few things have changed in my approach to link building since my first link building guide back in 2010. One thing that hasn’t changed is my view that 80% of positive (and negative) SEO ranking factors still come from external sources – I’m not just talking about links here, but social and citations, also. This post is my updated view on Link Building 101 in a post-Penguin world.

Link Building for the Little Guys
Matthew Barby

Link Building for the Little Guys

Link Building

As part of a small business, I always find it very frustrating when I read articles about the ‘best ways to build links to your website.’ What I get frustrated about is that if you are a business with very low influence and you create this type of new, unique content, it can be quite a struggle to get it in front of those you wish to see it. With this in mind, I thought I would share the methods that I have found to be most effective for all us ‘little guys.’

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The Blogger Outreach Equation
Kelsey Libert

The Blogger Outreach Equation

Link Building

Along with quality content ideas and relationship building, the Blogger Outreach Equation can help place your content in the hands of top tier publishers to get your company's message and thought leadership out to the masses. Kelsey Libert lays out the steps to show how the Blogger Outreach Equation can work for you.

How Blog Commenting Can Still Be a Healthy Part of Your Post-Penguin SEO Strategy [Case Study]
Dana Tan

How Blog Commenting Can Still Be a Healthy Part of Your Post-Penguin SEO Strategy [Case Study]

Link Building

This is a true SEO story. One of my daily tasks is to find, visit and sometimes write comments on blogs that are related to the two different companies for which I do in-house SEO. Now, I am not talking about using some cheezy interface that serves up blogs and tells me how many words I need to write and then takes my keywords and turns them into anchor text and leaves them as the comment author's name. That's not what I'm talking about.

Build Relationships Not Links
Scott Wyden Kivowitz

Build Relationships Not Links

Link Building

Link building is not completely a thing of the past, but definitely is thought about differently than it was. Link building now is more of a relationship building effort. The same way that building links through commenting is now comment marketing. Dare I bring you back to Rand's whiteboard Friday on the topic?

The Anatomy of a Link Building Hack Day
Rob Toledo

The Anatomy of a Link Building Hack Day

Link Building

The “hack day” is a popular and effective practice used by developers and designers alike to quickly ship new products with minimal administrative overhead. In this post, I'll walk you through the steps we take at Distilled when hosting our hack days and help you apply them to your own business.

7 Alternatives to Guest Blogging
Daniel Bailey

7 Alternatives to Guest Blogging

Link Building

Guest blogging has become a common link building tactic. The concept is a good one. Provide a blogger with something they can use (content), and in return, they give you a link. In practice, it's not always that smooth. Good blogs get approached all the time with free content offers.

Guest Blogging - Enough is Enough
Carson Ward

Guest Blogging - Enough is Enough

Link Building

Guest blogging is not a strategy, and it’s not a generic solution that can be applied to every client or every part of your site. Guest posts can be an effective supplemental tactic to a fully-formed strategy, but giving this tactic center stage is a recipe for frustration and inevitable defeat.