Posted by Carson Ward If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it's that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appearance of link spam. It's become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link...

Posted by iPullRank The Noob Guide to Online Marketing is arguably the greatest single post of all time. If you don’t agree, well, it’s at least my favorite. Oli Gardner (of Unbounce) displayed a playful writing style mixed with pixel perfect graphic design, and a GPS of a roadmap to take your site from mile marker zero to one hundred in six months. It’s nothing short of amazing. While savvy content marketers realize that many of Oli’s tactics will naturally attract links, fledgling link builders got to the 63rd page and were still wondering what to do. With this companion piece, it...

Posted by Stephanie Chang Some of the greatest challenges my previous ecommerce clients have faced have revolved around developing a cohesive and long-term content/link building strategy. They’ve done all the changes they can on the technical backend of the site, incorporated keywords on the site, created a crawlable internal linking structure, and have paid for PR releases, submitted directory submissions, and written the occasional blog post. Now they ask, what’s next? The latest Census Report indicates that ecommerce retail revenues are still rising quarter after quarter, meaning there is still boundless potential for the future of ecommerce. In addition, it’s also an exciting time...

Posted by TrendingSidewaysThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Outsourcing your link building efforts can work, but as a Textbroker author I can tell you right now, most people aren't doing it right. The majority of clients who submit articles are still living in a world before the Panda update, and a striking number of them still use tactics that haven't even worked since Google's inception. I'm going...

Posted by randfish If you've been in the SEO world a while, you're undoubtedly employing search queries to help discover and earn links (e.g. this blog post, this search query cheatsheet PDF, our LAA tool in Labs, etc). Query lists are handy to help in the manual link building process, but most of what's out there is designed for very direct, obvious link acquisition methodologies. This post is to help with some more obscure, less direct link building tactics. #1 - Awards Nearly every city, every industry and many communities on the web have annual awards they give to individuals, websites or companies. If...