Link prospecting is a necessary part of a link building campaign. It’s essentially the first step, a huge step, in starting your link building process. So, it’s important that you go into this step with the knowledge needed to be successful in your research.

Are you aware that valuable inbound links generate traffic and increase conversions?

In a recent Q&A, Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google revealed Google’s top three search ranking factors. 

If you aren’t already familiar with Buzzstream, it is a very useful link building tool that will help you through all stages of the outreach process.  From collecting prospects and their contact information to conducting your outreach, Buzzstream is there to help speed up the process by keeping you organized and making it just a little less tedious.  Below I will go through five reasons why Buzzstream is one of the most helpful tools you can use to run a successful link building campaign.

So, you’ve noticed a drop in your traffic, rankings, or you’ve been removed from the index all together, have you been hit by Google?

The Story of how a Nofollow Link Building Strategy Drove Page 1 Rankings and Increased Organic Traffic 288% in 1.5 Years

If you work in SEO – heck, even if you don’t, you might be familiar with the terms nofollow and dofollow in regards to backlinks. It is greatly debated within the industry whether nofollow links carry any weight or even matter at all. Well I am here to tell you today that NOfollow links DO matter in the world of SEO and link building. The stats and results provided below will show you how we were able to increase our clients’ organic traffic by 288% in about a year and a half, WITH 89% BEING NOFOLLOW LINKS! There is a lot to discuss so let’s get to it.

When looking to improve in anything, be it a sport, hobby, or profession, one of the first things to do is to look to others that are better than you. What have they done and what do they continue to do to be the best? How can you mimic their practices to reach similar or better outcomes? The same is true when it comes to Google rankings: you want to take a look at what the top sites in your industry are doing so you can learn how to achieve the desired results.

According to Twitter, there are 255 million monthly active users on the platform, and a booming 500 million Tweets sent per day. If you rely on Twitter as your source of SEO news and to stay current on industry happenings you need to be hearing from the right people.

Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, announced in a Google+ post that Google would be removing the profile photo and Google+ circle count associated with authorship of a webpage from search listings.

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, released another video on Google Webmasters YouTube to answer the following question:

“How can content be ranked if there aren't many links to it?

How Your Content Ranks

Cutts explains that the process by which Google judges content without many pages linking to it, is similar to how search engines worked in the days before SEO and link building: “You’re pretty much judging based on the text on the page at that point.”

Link building is far from being dead and if you implement proper white-hat, ethical strategies, you'll see a positive boost in your rankings. Let's talk links for just a minute, before we dive into the 3 key ways to improve your rankings.

It's important to keep in mind that links will continue to remain a strong ranking factor to how Google views the quality of your site, and it’s been stated by Matt Cutts several times throughout 2014. Recently in a You&A at SMX Advanced, Danny Sullivan asked the following:

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video on Google Webmaster Help answering:

“What happens when one page has two links to the same URL?”

Does it pass PageRank the same way? What about if the links have different anchor text? Luckily, Cutts answers these questions to the best of his ability without giving away his secrets (wishful thinking there).

Majestic SEO has done it again! They recently released another feature to their tool, called Topical Trust Flow, which works with all paid accounts within Majestic. Topical Trust Flow is one Majestic SEO Flow Metrics that categorizes every web page and domain into logical business verticals - it's a number predicting the proximity of any page within a website to any topic. 

If your website received a manual action notice from Google, you now have the chance to request to the almighty Google to reconsider your website. If you’re not sure if your website received a manual action, take a look at our blog post on, “How to Determine If You Were Hit By A Google Penalty Or An Algorithm Update”.

Now that we have that all squared away, we have 5 tips to share with you before submitting your reconsideration request.

In a recent video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt talks about the biggest SEO myths that are out today.

Cutts forms his response to this question: What are some of the biggest SEO myths you see still being repeated (either at conferences, or in blogs…etc.)

In a recent video from Google Webmaster Help, Matt Cutts replied to the following question:

How can I tell if my site is affected by a particular algorithm?

If you’ve ever experienced the shear panic of losing search engine rankings in Google, you’re not the only one. If this has happened, you may begin to question if you’ve been hit by a Google penalty or an algorithmic update. What’s the difference?

With the ever-changing Google Algorithm and increased Google penalties, link building has become more challenging than ever. Recent Google penalties to Rap Genius & Expedia (still speculative) continue to show why white hat link building strategies are so important. According to this article on Search Engine Roundtable, Expedia lost 25% of their Google traffic overnight. That’s a major drop off.

In yesterday’s video from Google Webmaster Help, Matt Cutts replied to the following question:

Matt, Do the good guys still stand a chance? We're a small company that hired an SEO firm that we thought was legit, but destroyed our rankings w/ spam backlinks. We've tried everything but nothing helps. What can a company with good intentions do?