Matt Vazquez says, “I stood up from my office chair, stepped behind it and leaned on its back with both hands so I could stare at the email from a new angle. I was silenced by the response of the blogger: “We’ve had a recent policy change here, and we no longer offer followed links. It’s hurting our reputation and being flagged by Google.” In that moment, the game changed for me. I’ve received some interesting responses from editors and bloggers about links before, but never as adamant and uninformed as this. I realized that I needed to develop a communication strategy for my... [...]

Eric Siu says, “Understanding and using the difference between external and internal links strategically as part of your overall digital marketing plan is an important part of SEO. Each type of link has its place in a strategic SEO plan aimed at boosting your position on the search engine results page. External or internal links: What’s the difference? External links point from one domain to an entirely separate domain. They may be links from your website to another website to provide additional information for readers, or they may be links from your website to an affiliate program.... [...]

Jim Yu says, “Prior to the recent arrival of Penguin 4.0, it had been nearly two years since Penguin was last updated. It was expected to roll out at the end of 2015, which then became early 2016. By the summer, some in the industry had given up on Google ever releasing Penguin 4.0. But why did it take so long? I’d argue that criticism directed at Google is in many cases unjustified, as people often take too simplistic a view of the task at hand for the search engine. Detecting and dealing with paid links is a lot harder than many people think, and there are likely good reasons why... [...]

Marcus Miller says, “So it happened. Google finally released Penguin 4.0 — the last Penguin update of its kind, as it now processes in real time as a part of Google’s core ranking algorithm. In this post, I want to take a look at what Penguin is, how this update affects the SEO community as a whole and how the brave and the bold can continue to safely improve their organic visibility without fear of repercussions from punitive search engine algorithms. The announcement After a few weeks of turbulence in the SERPs, the announcement that many had predicted was finally made. The Penguin 4.0 announcement had... [...]

Thomas Caulton says, “We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors’ broken pages that have been linked to by external sources. Allow me to elaborate. Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. That’s where the link building method I’ve outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors’... [...]

Andrew Dennis says, “In March, Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev stated that Google’s two top ranking factors are content and links. Content and links have a symbiotic relationship: great content attracts links, and links improve the visibility and popularity of content. However, not all types of content will attract links, and even content types that typically attract links require strategic promotion in order to secure those links. What makes content linkable? There are numerous types of content: blog posts, articles, white papers, eBooks, listicles, videos,... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google launched the real-time, more granular version of Penguin on Friday. Google wrote in its announcement that it “now devalues spam.” Many SEOs and webmasters took that to mean that Penguin no longer penalizes – and it seems like they are right. Google’s Gary Illyes said on my public Facebook post that the new Penguin algorithm “managed to devalue spam instead of demoting.” But he also said that Google’s recommendation for using the disavow file has not changed. In other words, you should use the disavow file to help recover from Penguin issues. But... [...]

Kelsey Libert says, “The Fractl team has worked on hundreds of content marketing projects. Along the way, we’ve kept track of a lot of data, including everywhere our client campaigns have been featured, what types of links each campaign attracted, and how many times each placement was shared. While we regularly look back on our data to evaluate performance per campaign and client, until now we’d never analyzed all of these data in aggregate. After combing through 31,000 media mentions and 26,000 links, here’s what we found. Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority... [...]

Conrad Saam says, “In an April 2016 article on Moz by Kristina Kledzik, “How Long Does it Take for Link Building to Impact Rankings,” the author posits that new links take about 10 weeks to have an impact. Our findings show the exact opposite: High-end link building has an immediate and persistent positive impact. I’ll explain further and share our data here. Kledzik’s study was on a moderately large site with roughly 200K pages and focused on moderately difficult keyword rankings. She correctly points out that with a multiplicity of variables, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint... [...]

Todd McDonald says, “A steady rise in content-related marketing disciplines and an increasing connection between effective SEO and content has made the benefits of harnessing strategic content clearer than ever. However, success isn’t always easy. It’s often quite difficult, as I’m sure many of you know. A number of challenges must be overcome for success to be realized from end-to-end, and finding quick ways to keep your content ideas fresh and relevant is invaluable. To help with this facet of developing strategic content, I’ve laid out a process below that shows how a few... [...]