11 Reasons Link Building Is A Futile Waste Of Time — And One Big Reason It Isn’t
I don’t have to build links anymore, and I have never felt so liberated. So free. All the years I spent endless hours trying to help content get discovered — and I didn’t realize I didn’t have to do any of it. Those 163 conference gigs? Waste of time. 300+ articles, columns…
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How To Analyze A Link: Link Building Basics
The importance of link quality in SEO cannot be overstated. Before you begin any link building project within SEO, you must be sure you’re pursuing links that will not only have an impact today, but will continue to have a positive impact in the future. That means understanding what makes a…
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Will Link Building Soon Be A Thing Of The Past?
The other day while working on a client proposal, I came to the section about link building and had to pause. While everything we include in a proposal is relevant, strategic, and in my opinion, a good tactic, I wasn’t sure I wanted to position it as link building. As someone who has been…
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Creating Links That Offer The Best User Experience
We focus a lot on where we our links should go. We analyze Domain Authority and social metrics until we can spew back a site’s numbers faster than our own phone number. We nit-pick sidebars, in-content and author box placements until we’re blue in the face. But we don’t put nearly…
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14 Link Resolutions for 2014
If 2013′s link building industry could be summed up in one word, that word would be “interesting.” There were some big shakeups that other people have covered in various locations on the web, so I won’t go into that here; but, what I will discuss is what your 14 resolutions…
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Preparing For The Link Apocalypse That May Or May Not Be Coming
Something big is happening to link building. Hummingbird might have been the writing on the wall signaling more changes to come; but, we still have no idea what those changes will actually look like. Will links be less important in 2014? Is it possible that they could go away? Should I start link…
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How SEO Greed Can Ruin A Perfectly Good Linking Strategy
By now, you are likely aware of the Rap Genius “Tweet In Exchange For Anchor Text” link scheme, hencefore to be known as TieFating. Barry Schwartz reported last week on John Marbach’s exposé of the popular music site, Rap Genius, which had started an “affiliate”…
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Link Building 2013: Looking Back At This Year’s Top Link Week Columns
With each passing year, search engine algorithms grow increasingly sophisticated in their ability to identify (and penalize) spammy links. Among other things, this year marked the fourth and fifth releases of Google’s spam-filtering Penguin update (Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, respectively)….
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The 7 Types Of People Who Want To Help You Build Links
With so much of link building focused on creating actual relationships these days, the idea that you can build high-quality links without people seems preposterous. Yes, I know there are still things like directories and post submissions but, come on… a real person has to approve those, right?…
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A Look Back On One Crazy Year Of Link Building
If 2012 was the year of Google Algorithm updates — Moz counted 37 big ones compared to the 15 in 2013 and 21 in 2011 — 2013 was the year that link building suffered from a serious identity crisis. It was sidelined, stretched, swindled and spit back out again more times than your average…
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Linksgiving: 10 Things To Be Thankful For This Year
With Thanksgiving just two days away, I thought it was only fitting to discuss what I think we should all be thankful for this year when it comes to link building. After all, with the surge of updates, algorithm shifts, and keyword reporting changes that have happened in the past year, it’s…
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If Link Building Really Is Dead, What Do We Do Now?
“He’s dead, Jim.” It’s been shouted from the rooftops, from here to Moz and every blog in between, but I guess it isn’t official until the doctor says so: Link building is dead. Depending on how much you agree with that statement, you’re somewhere in the five…
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Link Building At The Speed Of Natural
“Natural link building” has long been a sore spot (some would call it an oxymoron) among many in the online marketing community. The general argument goes something like this: “Any link that comes about because you pursued it cannot be considered natural.” or “The very…
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Down With Toolbar PageRank And Up With… What?
I’ve never been a big fan of Google’s Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) because, as you may know, it’s a metric that isn’t updated very often. It’s also been thrown around too much as a metric that gauges quality — and I’ve been doing this long enough to know that…
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Creative Link Building Ideas For Really Boring Websites
Let’s face it: you might have a business or product that is simply not sexy, and it will always be difficult to “build links.” In fact, it might be downright impossible, or just cost prohibitive. For many sites, it’s hard to build links from clients and prospects. And there…
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Using Analytics To Enhance Your Link Building Strategy
Like everyone else, I’m not psyched that Google took away my organic keyword data. It’s pretty uncool and, as a marketer, it makes my life a bit harder. However, analytics is much more than keywords; and, there’s a lot of great information in there that can help drive better…
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5 Ways To Make Your Client Kickoff Meeting A Success
When we moved to agile marketing for our internal process, it changed the way we think. Instead of finding any resources that were available, we had dedicated teams that worked on a smaller number of clients. Instead of working against a 12-month marke…
Why The YouTube Keyword Tool Is So Amazing For Link Building
Debra Mastaler mentioned the YouTube keyword tool again recently, and I don’t think I’ve been this excited about keywords in, well… ever. I confess to only now realizing how much of a help it can be. Never mind the awesome fact that you can get keywords and easily import them into…
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Did Hummingbird Eat Link Building?
Panda squashed bad content. Penguin froze low-quality links. And now, did Hummingbird eat link building? Hummingbird wasn’t just another algorithm update. It was more a re-tooling, behind-the-scenes adjustment to make Google faster and smarter. And it most likely opens the door for a lot more…
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How Will Google Hummingbird Impact Links? Here Are 6 Ways
So you have a question you would like answered, and that question is: “How Will Google Hummingbird Impact Links?” It’s still way too early in Hummingbird season to fully understand the impact of the new algorithm, but I’ve spotted a few clues, and the title of this column is…
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