Paddy Morgan says, “Not all links are created equal. One part of the Google algorithm is the number of links pointing at your website, but it would be foolish to make this a raw number and not take into account the quality of those links. Otherwise it would just be a free for all, and everyone would be trying to get as many links as they can with no regard for the quality of those links.Back in the early days of search engine optimization, it was pretty much a free-for-all because the search engines were not as good at determining the quality of a link. Even the introduction of PageRank,... [...]

Nadya Khoja says, “If you’re a marketer, then you understand the constant demand for “original content.”Every online publication wants something new, exciting and unseen anywhere else, but with over 211 million pieces of content being produced every minute, it’s nearly impossible to come up with something truly unique that hasn’t been published elsewhere.The first trick is understanding how to make the most of one batch of research. If you are constantly researching for every 400-800-word article that you write, chances are you aren’t producing very much content. I’m not... [...]

Lindsay Kolowich says, “In the seemingly eternal struggle to keep up with Google’s algorithm updates, savvy marketers are always looking for ways to increase the authority of their content. One of the ways to boost your blog posts in search? Increase the number of quality inbound links from other people’s websites to your own website.While link building is critical to your SEO strategy, it’s not something you have complete control over. At the end of the day, it’s all about creating awesome content that people can find easily and then want to link to.Don’t... [...]

Steve Rayson says, “This summer BuzzSumo teamed up with Moz to analyze the shares and links of over 1m articles. We wanted to look at the correlation of shares and links, to understand the content that gets both shares and links, and to identify the formats that get relatively more shares or links.What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is simply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most... [...]

Felix Tarcomnicu says, “”Backlinks,” meaning sites that link to your site, are, for most search engines, the supreme ranking factor. So is getting more organic traffic.Because that traffic is directly related to the quality of the backlinks your website has, the more authoritative websites that link to you, the better rankings and traffic you’ll get.And of course you want to keep an eye on your Google rankings. When crawling the web, Google looks in particular for your website’s backlinks, to understand how your pages are connected to one other and in what ways. Certainly... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “This year marked a return for me to Instagram, where my account had largely been dormant. I’ve greatly enjoyed my time on the service, but I find several things maddening. Here’s what I see wrong with Instagram, despite its great success.1) You Can’t Regram NativelyIf I see something awesome on Twitter or Facebook, it’s easy for me to share that with others. On Instagram, there’s no such luck. If I want to “regram” an image, I either need to use a third-party tool or make a copy and credit the originator.Neither is satisfactory. Moreover, as The Awl... [...]

MOZ team says, “A single fantastic (or “10x”) piece of content can lift a site’s traffic curves long beyond the popularity of that one piece. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about why those curves settle into a “new normal,” and how you can go about creating the content that drives that change“.The Linkbait Bump: How Viral Content Creates Long-Term Lift in Organic TrafficMOZ Blog [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “This week, we launched a feature inside Open Site Explorer that I’m very excited about – the Spam Score Histogram, found by clicking on the “spam analysis” tab.The histogram is particularly useful for visualizing the distribution of potentially spammy links that show up in a site’s link profile. Above, for example, we’re looking at Moz.com, with a strong distribution of sites that have 0-5 spam flags. According to our research, that means the vast majority of those sites are unlikely to be penalized or banned by Google”.New... [...]

Alex Espenson says, “At some point or another, every business owner will hear the term “supply chain management” thrown around, usually alongside the terms “logistics” or “operations management.”Use of the term “supply chain management” arose in the late 1980s and has come to refer to the process of influencing the behavior of supply chains in order to achieve beneficial results.Supply chains include all of the businesses, companies, and other activities needed to develop, produce, and ship a product or service. So essentially, supply chain... [...]

Nick Chowdrey says, “If you’re still operating link building campaigns, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Here’s why and how.Link building has been a dying SEO practice for some time. Google Penguin is now three years old and it’s getting smarter every year at identifying between spammy and genuine links.If you’re still operating link building campaigns, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Here’s why and how.Outdated practicesGoogle wants rankings to reflect the popularity and quality of pages as accurately as possible. In the early days of Google, there was a general... [...]