Link-building tactics from Moz — Cyrus Shepard // Moz

Quotes

• “We recently published the beginner's guide to link building. It was by Paddy Moogan and one of the best link builders we know runs the Aira agency in the UK.”

• “So link building is kind of a controversial topic. It's one of those pillars of SEO. At times it can be a black hat. Sometimes it's a little bit of a gray area...”

• “There's people in the SEO industry, very respected SEOs, who mistakenly believe that any link building violates Google's guidelines. And that certainly isn't the case.”

• “I say, when you control the anchor text of when people are linking to you, that's a good standard to determine if you're violating Google's guidelines. Otherwise I think it's pretty fair game.”

• “... just going out and straight up buying links, paying people to put a link on a website and doing mass distribution. You should not do that.”

• “I think each of those techniques, though, has the potential for abuse or the potential to be white hat, depending on how aggressively you pursue them.”

• “It seems like Google reps straight out discourage conversations around link building... but it seems observationally links are needed at least to get on page one of the top 10 results... we find that it's really hard to rank at all. If you don't have any links.”

• “Every link is a vote. It's a validation, it's a vote of confidence to Google for your content, but it also counts towards your “domain authority”, how respected you appear in search results.”

• “I think that at the end of the day, Google's primary concern is how much ad revenue they're going to be able to create how many pages they can serve. And if the search results are impacted, if the user experience isn't great, they serve less ads.”