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!
What motivates a link? Sometimes it's referencing data/research/news or given because you've produced something interesting and valuable. Sometimes it's because another site has licensed or adopted content/widgets/badges from you. But, in most cases where an editorial link is given, I find that the underlying motivation is because that link provides some benefit to the linki...
In reading Rand’s post on the paid links debate and the related comments that followed, as well as the discussion about link brokers on another site, I wanted to take some time to fig...
In the Bible, Jesus tells the story called "The Parable of the Lost Sheep". If a man lost a sheep, he would leave the others to look for it. When he had found it he...
Though it's certainly not the most hyped, an SEOmoz tool I took an immediate fascination with is the Top Pages tool (found in SEOmoz Labs - PRO only). What it does is very simple yet powerful: you give it a domain, and it returns a list of the pages at that domain that are linked to by the most root domains (sort...
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We receive many questions every day in our Q & A section. Every question is answered by a different person and is handled personally. Often times we will run across a specific question being asked various times. Although the question is usually never exactly the same, the answer is often fairly similar. One question that has been popping up lately is whether it is really worth it, from an SEO ...
Tonight I'm tackling a contentious, thorny issue and that's always a tough task. Thus, I'll ask, up front, for a bit of leeway in how my words are parsed and interpreted. I'm happy to make clarifications on specifics in the comments. Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practi...
There's one piece of advice I've given to quite a few people recently, who are just starting to market their website. I thought I'd share this with you, and show how savvy internet marketers can get even more out of the same tip.
It's 9:30am and you've just started a pitch for a new SEO client. They're the curious type - wanting to know how search engines rank pages, why the changes you'll recommend will make an impact, where you learned to do SEO, and who you can list as good examples of your work. As you dive deeper into the requirements for the project, you arrive at the link building section. The client wants to kno...
What enthralled me about using SEOmoz's Competitive Link Finder was not the raw stats. In fact, considering how early on in the SEO process I am with my current client, it was somewhat disheartening to see how strong the backlinks were to established competitor sites. What was a lot more interesting was to see the kind of sites that were providing my competitors backlinks. Some were resourc...
Linkscape has always been a project with a lot of promise. Building a crawl of the WWW that can expose link data in interesting ways, calculate metrics in the ways search engines do and surfacing potential SEO opportunities are all a part of that. Last week, Linkscape took a giant leap forward in usefulness with Nick Gerner's new ...
Well, it wasn't easy.Harvesting backlinks is hard but harvesting quality backlinks is much harder. Why people would give you links for free? Why people in your industry will do so without asking for a favor in return?Family firstWe always go for new backlinks, new websites, new partnerships and so on, but what about our old backlinks? do they s...
Link building for small ecommerce sites can be amongst the toughest SEO challenges - but also the most common. I'd like to share a few bits of advice for anyone rising to the challenge - whether you're working in-house or as an agency. These are targetted at small companies, probably with limited internal resource or a small SEO agency contract, and who don't have a PR firm able to get them into newspapers or an advertising budget that will put them in magazines and on radio, etc.
In college I worked for a conservative magazine called The Brown Spectator. While it was only a college magazine, I had a ton of fun working on it to practice SEO. My proudest moment was the day I discovered I was ranking number 1 for “Mitt Romney” in google images—although it didn't last long because I screwed wit...
When I talk about 'niche blogs', I mean blogs that are regularly updated and focus mainly, but not exclusively, on a certain subject area like, for example, crocheting or tea. More often than not, a blog with a specialty will be of a much higher quality than your average 'rambling and musings of x' site. However, with a zillion new blogs published per hour, it's getting increasingly difficult to ferret these quality blogs out, particularly if they're not in the business of being found. That makes it sound like I'm talking about underground crochet blogs. I'm not. I just mean blogs that aren't particularly well optimised for the search engines and don't know an awful lot about things like title tags or keyphrases.