Link Building looks at one of the most fundamental and yet challenging aspects of search marketing: Building and nurturing those all-important inbound links to your web site. Columnists offer insights and tips for effective link building and discuss controversial techniques like linkbaiting and buying links.

Must-Have Browser Tools For Link Builders

Sep 11, 2012 at 4:24pm ET by Eric Ward

Of all the tasks associated with content advocacy (I have never actually liked the term link building, and my business card has never included those words, plus doesn't 'content advocacy' just sound better than link building?), there are a few tasks that are a genuine PITA. There have been many tools created to help manage the processes of link building content advocacy. Most of the tools are designed to help analyze backlinks, help pre-define link prospecting query strings, provide some sort of page scoring, or identify a contact address. Some tools are costly, some are free. There have [...]

Are You Using Gap Analysis For Multinational Linkbuilding?

Sep 11, 2012 at 11:52am ET by Chris Liversidge

Linkbuilding still lies at the core of any successful SEO campaign. Indeed, campaigns at the very top end in the most competitive verticals are all about the effectiveness of their linkbuilding strategy. When you look at delivering significant returns across a range of countries, this truism is even more pronounced: despite all the advances in SEO strategy over the years, without a killer linkbuilding strategy you won't compete at the very top level. Achieve Lasting Link Value The guts of a solid strategy, for me, revolve around achieving excellence in two areas of your linkbuil [...]

How To Remove Your Unnatural Inbound Links

Sep 4, 2012 at 10:13am ET by Erin Everhart

Recently, Google went a little crazy — it’s cool; they came back — which subsequently caused anyone who owns a website to go a little nuts, too. Google has sent out oodles of the above messages over the past couple of months, and it has caused a lot of people to question if and how they should remove links in the first place. I’m a strong believer in focusing on building good links rather than dwelling on the past, but sometimes, the past is so egregious that trying to remove your bad links is the only course of action. Here’s how to do it. Start By Getting Your Data First, p [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Google Reminds Webmasters: Selling Links Can Lead To PageRank Penalty

Aug 28, 2012 at 9:46am ET by Barry Schwartz

Matt Cutts, Google's lead of search spam, wrote a blog post named "Why did our PageRank go down?" The post is a reminder to webmasters that selling links that pass PageRank can lead to a Google penalty. Back in October 2007, Google officially came out saying selling paid links can hurt your PageRank and then shortly after, Google dished out the PageRank penalties to many web sites, including some major newspaper web sites. Since then, Google added the terms to their webmaster guidelines and has done videos on the topic. Matt shared the email he sent to the publisher about why their [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links | Top News

50+ Things Every Link Builder Needs To Know

Aug 21, 2012 at 5:15pm ET by Julie Joyce

Like it or not, link building has been and still is big, big business. Doing it well takes a lot of time and resources, which means that many webmasters/site owners can't or don't want to do it themselves. Many agencies that handle other aspects of search engine marketing want to outsource it simply because of the massive resource drain. That's great news for people like me who specialize in link building but the intense supply and demand nature of links coupled with the ease of promoting yourself through social media have led to a frightening increase in people who build bad links and real [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

The Unbearable Torture Of Linking

Aug 14, 2012 at 9:38am ET by Eric Ward

[caption id="attachment_130446" align="alignright" width="238" caption="It's not too late to escape link building prison"][/caption] It's been a long, painful Spring and Summer for a lot of websites and link builders. I took a month away from it all for personal reasons, but I did conduct a couple linking strategy training sessions, and kept on top of things via my iPad. In this time, I read a few hundred posts about Panda's and Penguin updates, unnatural link warnings, freaked out Web marketers, and noted a general consensus that the Summer of 2012 is when the scales finally tipped [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Link Week

Google Explains New Link Warnings, Says Don’t Panic But Don’t Ignore

Jul 30, 2012 at 11:44am ET by Danny Sullivan

Confused by the latest link warnings that Google has been sending out? As we covered before, it's all been pretty confusing. That's why Google has posted more information meant to calm some worries, though it's still likely that even after this, some are going to panic. The "Old" Link Warnings: Entire Site Impacted Google's post starts with some history, explaining just as we've done how earlier this year, it began sending out link warnings: Let's talk about the original link messages that we've been sending out for months. When we see unnatural links pointing to a site, there are d [...]

Time & Value Of Link Cleanups: Should You Even Bother?

Jul 24, 2012 at 9:15am ET by Julie Joyce

Link cleanups are all the rage right now, rightly so if you can judge by the number of webmasters who received Google warnings or had their sites tank. Strategies for effective cleanup have been outlined, tools to help you find contacts for cleanup have been unveiled, but there isn't much information out there about the bottom line: are link cleanups worth the time and effort? Who Should Cleanup? Now a caveat…if you've received a warning from Google, I don't think that you have a choice here. You need to clean up your links. If you haven't received a warning, let's put you into two cam [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Here’s A New Twist: Directories Now Charging NOT To Link

Jul 20, 2012 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

For the past year, Google has been sending out link penalty notifications for unnatural links pointing to your web site. Those notifications kicked up a notch earlier this year and since then - especially with the Penguin update, webmasters and SEOs have been obsessed with link removals. Link Removal Fees: With this, there are many out there trying to capitalize on this fear. A reader sent us an example of a directory with a special landing page specifically designed to collect money from webmasters in order to remove links from their site. The site offers you to pay them and in exchange, th [...]

Cutts: Infographic Links Might Get Discounted In The Future

Jul 9, 2012 at 5:02pm ET by Barry Schwartz

In an in-depth interview between Eric Enge and Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts - Cutts said that Google may discount the value of links generated by infographics. Matt Cutts told Eric: This is similar to what people do with widgets as you and I have talked about in the past. I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site. Why? Aren't infographics great linkable content? They are [...]

Matt Cutts: Don’t Write The Epitaph For Links Yet [SMX Advanced 2012 Video]

Jul 5, 2012 at 2:38pm ET by Matt McGee

Will social signals replace links as a primary SEO signal affecting Google's rankings? Have social signals already replaced links in that way? That topic came up last month during the keynote conversation with Google's Matt Cutts at our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land's Editor-In-Chief, asked a series of link-related questions that led the conversation through topics like no-followed links, affiliate links, paid links and more. For a few years now, some SEO insiders have suggested that social signals are replacing links as a quality signal for Goo [...]

SMX Advanced Video: Google’s Matt Cutts On A Disavow-This-Link Tool

Jun 29, 2012 at 2:40pm ET by Matt McGee

All the talk today about Bing's launch of a disavow this link tool is a good reminder that we should go back into our video archives and post the comments that Google's Matt Cutts made about a tool like that during our SMX Advanced event earlier this month. Cutts was speaking with Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan during their annual keynote conversation when the subject turned to "negative SEO" and the possibility that some recent Google updates had made it easier for one website to purposely hurt another site with low-quality links. Here's some of that discussion: You can go back [...]

Not All Bad Links Hurt You, Google Ignores Links Also

Jun 29, 2012 at 1:34pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google doesn't always penalize you for bad links, they sometimes and very often, will ignore links completely that they find to be against their guidelines. Back in 2007, Google started penalizing sites for selling paid links and over the years they have penalized many sites for buying links. Recently, Google has stepped up their notifications of unnatural link warnings and with the Penguin update many webmasters have been obsessed with cleaning up their external link profiles. Ignoring Links But you need to know, not all links that may look bad or even be really bad actually harm your si [...]

The Domino Effect Of Links & Relationships

Jun 26, 2012 at 10:59am ET by Julie Joyce

Link building can, and should, be a domino effect. A good solid link should lead to more good, solid links, but do we always pursue links with this in mind? I confess that I don't always. Sometimes a link is just a link, and that's where it ends, but moving forward in the wake of the recent algorithm updates, I think we'll all be better off if we try to build links that build links. Along with that, since I firmly believe that building relationships builds links, we'll talk about how to do that, too. It's simple and easy but sometimes the simple and easy methods are the most overlooked. [...]

Google’s Matt Cutts On Affiliate Links: We Handle Majority Of Them

Jun 25, 2012 at 10:38am ET by Barry Schwartz

The video about is from the SMX Advanced show in 2012 where Danny Sullivan asked Google's Matt Cutts about nofollowing affiliate links. Matt responded that although they handle the majority of affiliate links automatically, if you are at all worried, you should nofollow those links to be careful. Here is what Matt said, if you can't watch the video above: We handle the vast majority of affiliate stuff correctly because if it is a large enough affiliate network we know about it and we handle it on our side. Even though we handle I believe the vast majority of affiliate links app [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links

8 Tips To Increase Your Link Building Efficiency

Jun 12, 2012 at 11:12am ET by Erin Everhart

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently that talk about how to dedicate enough time to link building to see results without it taking over your life. To be blunt, that’s a load of crap. If something is scalable, its size can be changed, like fonts. How long you have to link build for to get results will never change. It will always be one of the most time-consuming and arguably hardest things you do. If it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong. Still, there are a lot of things you can do to improve your efficiency and productivity. Below are just some of my favorite, but fair warning: They’re [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

The Four Keys To Post-Penguin Directory Submission Happiness

Jun 11, 2012 at 1:18pm ET by Andrew Shotland

The Google+ Local launch came out while I was working on this piece so it merits a brief mention. While Google+ Local will be a big deal, at the moment for most local businesses, it is not a huge deal. Thus far, there does not appear to be much change in Google's main local rankings algorithm besides the fact that Google+ Local pages will be indexed versus the old Places pages which were pseudo-indexed. It seems as if this update is mostly about getting us ready for changes coming down the road, where social activity gets even more ingrained in Google's algo. If you're interested in the sub [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Local Search

Link Building Means Earning “Hard Links” Not “Easy Links”

Jun 7, 2012 at 3:07pm ET by Danny Sullivan

For ages, Google has encouraged people to build links in order to rank well. But in the wake of the Google Penguin Update, it's become painfully clear to me how many people have failed to understand the inherent quality links part of that link building message. Consider this a wake-up call. Yes, you want links, but links that are hard to get, that take effort to obtain, that you've somehow earned, not "easy links." Yesterday, at our SMX Advanced show, I went on a rant about this. All my frustration recently that so many seem so confused just bubbled out. You can listen to that below, if you [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Link Building | Top News

How To Panic-Proof Your Link Campaign

May 29, 2012 at 4:55pm ET by Julie Joyce

All too often, I get a fair amount of frantic emails from people who are seeing a dropoff in rankings and/or traffic after the latest algorithmic update and are looking for help or just a second opinion. Sometimes a keyword that has been number 2 for 8 months in a row moves down a spot to number 3. Sometimes one drops off the first page and isn't in the top 100. Sometimes traffic almost completely dies. In any case, it creates panic. Most people don't think very clearly when they panic. Their immediate response is something drastic, their directives are to take place yesterday, and t [...]

iAcquire: We’re Abandoning Paid Links

May 29, 2012 at 3:13pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Last week, iAcquire found itself accused of purchasing links for clients. Google seemed convinced, banning iAcquire from its index. Now, iAcquire says that it will no longer purchase links for new clients and will phase out paid links for existing customers and campaigns. "In certain cases, we have allowed finanical compensation to develop links, not as our only tool but one of them," said Joe Griffin, cofounder and partner with iAcquire, when I spoke with him earlier today. "Effectively immediately, we've removed that tool from our toolset. We've issued a company-wide memo and told everyo [...]

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX Advanced - June 11-12, 2013
SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 20-21, 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014

EMEA

SMX Paris - June 6-7, 2013
SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Nov. 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - Jan. 2014
SMX Munich - March 25-26, 2014
SMX London - May 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.