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

BOTW Blog Directory
Rand Fishkin

BOTW Blog Directory

I was going to write about this, but Andy beat me to it. BOTW directory (note: they do advertise with SEOmoz) has launched a "free" inclusion blog directory for sites that qualify. Andy thinks it looks good and I agree: As opposed to many directories out there, ...

Delicious and Digg
Rand Fishkin

Delicious and Digg

Although I rarely point to TW, as everyone here has already read their posts twice, there's an excellent comment on the thread about Digg that I felt worth publicizing. It comes from John Resig, who writes: The two 'Web 2.0' traffic b...

What a Links Page Should Look Like
Rand Fishkin

What a Links Page Should Look Like

The question was asked at HighRankings, but I think it's a great, universal question for site builders. What do visitors want from a links page and what should we, therefore, provide. My personal feeling is that your outbound links should be structured in one of 3 ways: When appropriate, link direct...

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Rand, How do I make Link-Worthy Content?
Rand Fishkin

Rand, How do I make Link-Worthy Content?

I get asked this all the time when I'm consulting. It's the mantra of the link hungry and content poor and it's a great question - one that's worthy of being repeated over and over (though it need not always involve my first name). There's no easy answer, but there is a simple way I can show you the kinds of content and let you think up your own way to do it. Thanks to our friends at de...

Press Release Advice
Rand Fishkin

Press Release Advice

One of the best threads in SEO is Cre8asite's one on Press Releases for Google News. Advice given there ranges from source to source but is all of very high quality, including an actual illustration of the traffic and readership levels that can be achieved with a successful release. While I encourage a full reading, I'll...

Weigh in on Article Trades
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Weigh in on Article Trades

Lots of people are doing article trades or posting them out for massive distribution. They do this hoping for a traffic flow and also for the links that will appear within the article or in their signature line.I think that this worked great in the early days of SEO, bu...

When Money Can't Buy You Link Love
Rand Fishkin

When Money Can't Buy You Link Love

What do you do when money doesn't appeal to your link targets. This happens to me all the time - sometimes because they're an educational institution, a non-profit or simply a webmaster who doesn't want to "compromise". If purchasing "advertising" links becomes impossible, there are some great ways around it that I've used successfully. Know Before You Ask - When...

Link Data at the Search Engines
Rand Fishkin

Link Data at the Search Engines

A thread from surfdude (Vaughn of the famous One-Pagers) has a thread at SEOChat on the value of link data fomr the search engines and the reliability of the numbers therein. He notes that as you drill down to the end of the listing results, the number of results reported by the search engines changes (at Google, Yahoo! and MSN). I...

Dirty Tricks at the DMOZ
Rand Fishkin

Dirty Tricks at the DMOZ

I watched a nasty trick take effect at the DMOZ today. Apparently, unscrupulous editors have been getting more and more black hat about using particularly clever techniques to foil their competitors who are listed at the directory. This particular technique came to me via an online acquaintance whose name I promised not to mention. This editor's technique, as he controls some real estat...

Unconventional Link-Building Ideas
E

Unconventional Link-Building Ideas

Everybody talks about recip link trades, directory submission and buying links. How about let's share a few unconventional link-building ideas here. I'll give you my best three and if every person who reads this adds just one more we will build one of the best collections on the web. Ask for the Link: If you have content that people will link to naturally then plant a seed in the mi...