70+ Backlinking Resources You Need to Know | Chapter 10 – Guide to Backlinks

Now that we’ve covered just about everything there is to know about back-linking, I wanted to cover a fairly comprehensive set of back linking resources. In this chapter you’ll find link building guides, strategies, case studies, articles and blog posts, and tools to use in your quest for better links.

Link building guides

Naturally, I think this book is a complete guide! But if you’re looking for other great link building guides, here are the options I recommend:

Link Building: The Definitive Guide – Backlinko

This guide by Brian Dean of Backlinko is a fantastically complete introduction to the topic.

Chapter Seven: Growing Popularity and Links – Moz

This is one chapter in the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. This chapter in particular is focused on link building. Another good alternative from Moz is The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, which is, just as the title suggests, geared more towards beginners.

The Advanced Guide to Link Building – QuickSprout

This guide was written by both Neil Patel and Brian Dean, two of the gurus in link building today. It’s full of actionable advice and step-by-step details.

SEO Link Building: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide – Jayson DeMers

This is another good step-by-step guide that is a recent addition to the literature on link building.

Link building tactics and strategies

These resources list and describe a wide variety of link building tactics and strategies:

Link Building Tactics – The Complete List – Point Blank SEO

This list organizes link building tactics by category and time required to execute, so it’s easy to parse them all out.

101 Ways to Get Quality Backlinks To Your Blog in 2016 – Onibalusi Bamidele

This is a very recent list of 101 link building tactics.

SEO Backlinks – 25 Types Of Backlinks That Are Safe To Get For SEO – Felix Tarcomnicu

In this post you’ll find a description of 25 kinds of backlinks that are safe to build for SEO purposes in 2016 and actionable steps for how to build them.

Using Educational Linkbait to Get Valuable .edu Links – WordStream

This piece was originally posted in 2011 but has been consistently updated and remains useful today.

Low Hanging Fruit: Link Building With Screaming Frog – Ethan Lyon

This is a useful guide on how to use Screaming Frog, one of the link builder’s essential tools.

9 Link Building Resources That’ll Increase Your Search Rankings – Neil Patel

True to his typical practice, Neil Patel describes nine different strategies in great detail in this post, showing you exactly how to use each one with pictures and step-by-step instructions.

200+ Link Building Strategies – The Complete List with Guideline – Mahesh Mohan

This big list gathers most of the link building strategies in one place. It doesn’t offer a lot of detail, but it does let you see a comprehensive list.

The Complete Guide To Link Building With Local Events – Kane Jamison, Moz

This guide to focuses entirely on local events as a means for link building and goes into a lot of detail in this area, making it very useful.

Link building case studies

This is a series of useful link building case studies that you can refer to as you implement the same strategies as part of your link building campaign.

How to Get High Quality Backlinks (Without Guest Posting) – Brian Dean

In this piece Brian Dean describes his link building strategy “The Moving Man Method” and provides a case study showing how effective it is.

How To Build Links To Your Blog – A Case Study – Matthew Barby, Moz

This post describes how one man created a massive boost in traffic to his blog as he traveled.

The 10 Golden Rules To Attracting Authority Links – Neil Patel on Moz

In this piece Neil Patel presents case studies to illustrate his golden rules for building only authoritative links.

Link Building Case Study: How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days – Brian Dean

In this article Brian Dean describes the skyscraper technique for link building using a case study to show both how the method works and how effective it is.

White Hat SEO Case Study: How To Get a #1 Ranking – Brian Dean

This is another look at the skyscraper technique in action, this time used by more than one business.

Case Study: How We Gained More than 100 Links for a Travel Website via Content Marketing – Tom Mcloughlin

This case study describes a marketing win based on the finale to the fifth season of Game of Thrones that resulted in the acquisition of 111 linking domains (as of when the piece was written in early 2016).

Link building articles and blog posts

Here are just a few of the many link building articles and blog posts that I find the most useful among the tons that are out there:

10 Types of Links that Really Matter and How to Get Them – Kaiser the Sage

In this post Kaiser the Sage covers how to market to get the ten kinds of links that are most able to hit each of the four major points your business needs to cover: branding, conversions, rankings, and traffic.

50+ Things Every Link Builder Needs To Know – Julie Joyce, Search Engine Land

This is a useful guide to all of the little things you may not think about as you set out to create a link building strategy such as how to read a robots.txt file and how to analyze a site in five minutes. And check out the sequel, 50+ More Things Every Link Builder Should Know.

17 Untapped Backlink Sources (Updated) – Brian Dean

Updated for 2016, this resource list reminds you of some of the best and often underutilized sources for great back links.

10 Super Easy SEO Copywriting Tips For Improved Link Building – Cyrus Shepard, Moz

This piece details the many ways that copywriting impacts the success of your link building venture and provides actionable tips for better copywriting.

10 Ways to Use Images for Link Building – Kaiser the Sage

This is a fantastic guide to combining the powerful marketing tool of vivid imagery and a strong link building strategy and offers a number of concrete tactics for using images to build links.

What Is A “Good Link Profile” & How Do You Get One? – Neil Patel, QuickSprout

This is just like it sounds: in this piece Neil Patel explores what a good link profile looks like and then shows you how to achieve one.

Targeted Link Building in 2016 – Rand Fishkin, Whiteboard Friday

In this installment of the Moz Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains why targeted link building is still important and shows how to develop a targeted link building process.

The Power Of Syndicated Content In Your Content Marketing Efforts – Neil Patel, Search Engine Journal

Content syndication, or letting more than one site or platform feature the same content, can be a powerful tool for link building if you know how to use it, and that’s what Neil Patel shows you how to do in this piece.

The Ultimate Guide To Leaving Comments On Blogs – Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

This post covers the benefits of commenting on blogs and offers a step-by-step guide to making sure your comments are the best they can be for link building purposes.

How To Get Your Content Linked To From Top-Tier Sites – Matthew Barby, Search Engine Land

In this article Matthew Barby takes the reader through the process of ensuring that a link building strategy is set up to yield links back to top tier sites.

Building Links With Video Content – Jacob Klein, Moz

This piece focuses on link building with video content and offers actionable advice to use in this process.

Link Building A-Z Guide – Definitions & Terms – Search Engine Watch

This is a useful glossary of link building terms and definitions.

Linkerati’s Link Building Resources – Page One Power

This is pretty much a huge list of resources, links, people, and articles for link builders.

Link building blogs and forums

If you’re hoping to stay current, improve your strategies, and build authority as a link builder, following link building blogs and participating in forums is a great idea. Here are some of my top picks in this area:

Backlinko: for SEO training guides, case studies, and link building tactics.

Moz: for SEO, link building, and other relevant resources.

Point Blank SEO: for link building strategies and courses.

QuickSprout (both the blog and the university): for all things link building.

Vertical Measures: for useful articles.

Wiep: for helpful posts.

Link building tools and other resources

This is where I’m listing and briefly describing all of the best tools and resources for link building that are out there right now. Of course personal preference is going to play a role, so take the time to experiment and see what you like best.

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking link building tools allow you to enter the URLs of your competitors in the search box to see the websites and number of links they are targeting.

Agency Analytics

Agency Analytics is an all in one reporting platform for SEOs features analytics, a rank tracker, and a backlink monitor tool.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most powerful suites of SEO and social media tools available; it is most widely known for its backlink checker but also offers keyword rankings, competitive alerts, and other outreach and competitive analysis tools.

Alexa

Alexa provides a traffic rank get and quick site metrics for any domain name.

Algoroo

Algoroo is an algorithm change monitor that provides winners and losers individually and by industry at a glance; this information can help you vet sites for link building.

Authority Labs

The paid version of this SEO tool package has a lot of different functions, but Authority Labs also offers a free Backlink Checker tool.

Backlink Watch

Use Backlink Watch to see detailed information about the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to any URL. For each site you enter in this tool will show you anchor text, a nofollow flag for each available inbound link, pagerank, and total outbound links.

Bing Webmaster Tools Link Explorer

Link Explorer, part of Bing Webmaster Tools, is great for competitive back link analysis; it is fast and can analyze new content quickly, even for pages that aren’t yours. Its additional query and anchor text filters are also ideal for finding niche backlinks fast.

BrightEdge

BrightEdge offers comprehensive management for your back links strategy, including customizable dashboards that let you analyze and track your back links over time based on anchor text, category, date added, page score, page URL, and type. BrightEdge also provides you with deep competitive analysis tools and integration with the Moz and Majestic databases.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream makes link building easier and faster by expediting the research process itself; it allows you to skip the spreadsheets and automatically add prospects, websites, and social metrics to your campaign.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is perfect for analyzing what content performs best for competitors, choosing which topics have the most promise, and for finding influencers and their websites as you prospect for link building opportunities.

Check My Links

Check My Links, a Chrome extension, checks your pages for broken links, tells you which are broken, and lets you know what kind of page errors are connected to each broken link (404, 500, etc.).

CognitiveSEO

CognitiveSEO is another competitive analysis and tracking tool that provides data that is easy to use and understand. The unnatural link detection tool is especially useful if you’ve been penalized or if you suspect problematic links, and it works together with the tool’s ready-to-send Disavow File.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg allows you to track where on your page visitors click, how many clicks each link gets, and where your most valuable traffic comes from. These features can in turn help you assess which of your links are performing the best as you assess your strategy.

Domain Hunter Plus

Domain Hunter Plus offers the Open Site Explorer metrics for every dead link, the option to export all broken links into a CSV file, and domain registration information for broken links.

FollowerWonk

Use FollowerWonk to prospect for link building opportunities with influencers like you’d use BuzzSumo.

Fresh Web Explorer

Fresh Web Explorer lets you search for mentions of your brand that don’t link to you so you can reach out and ask for a link, or at least monitor the conversation. It also allows you to find content that’s copied from you without a link, and find sites that mention your competitors, but not you.

GroupHigh

GroupHigh provides intelligence on bloggers and influencers segmented by niche and offers information on reach, following, and other metrics that you might want as you decide which link building opportunities you want to pursue.

HARO

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) connects journalists with sources as they research for upcoming stories; this in turn gives sources (like you) daily opportunities to gain valuable media coverage. Even the larger media outlets are use HARO, so it offers lots of chances to build links.

Link Assistant

Link Assistant is a link management tool designed to automate link building and avoid Penguin penalties. It lets you organize and store all your back links in the dashboard; classify and prioritize the links so you can search them quickly; and store all your backlink data such as webmaster contact information, anchor text, and link verification details. It also verifies link quality, helps you conduct removal outreach, and find higher quality back links to replace faulty links.

Link Diagnosis

Link Diagnosis is a Firefox tool for competitor analysis that calculates page rank, link strength, and other factors that influence the back linking strategies of your competitors.

Link Prospector

Link Prospector, a tool from Citation Labs, is a backlink search engine that can help you find back linking opportunities based on your search terms among its 17 website search categories including “Accessible Reporters,” “Guest Posts,” “Links Pages,” and “Reviews.” Use it to plan your content or pitch and place existing content.

Link Research Tools

Link Research Tools offers data from a fresh crawl each time you use it based on a full aggregation of 24 link backend sources. It also offers customizable metrics and the most up to date data for link analysis possible.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange works a lot like Crazy Egg, offering heat maps of activity and clicking on your site.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO offers a suite of tools that show inbound links and summarize site data. The Backlink History tool lets you see how many back links web crawlers can detect on any given URL and compare competing domains, while the link intelligence API gives you a tremendous amount of data for your link building strategy.

Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks gives you a range of SEO metrics such as a backlink status checker tool, citation flow, domain authority, external link count, majestic trust, MozRank, page authority, referring traffic for each back link, and social shares in one place. It also makes link management simpler by letting you handle link data including bookmarklets, disavow links export, expiration dates, tags and notes, and more from the dashboard.

Moz algorithm change history

Moz algorithm change history keeps you up to date on every change Google makes to its algorithms so you can match dates of changes with drops in your traffic. Use this in your link building to find links that may be problematic or drawing penalties.

MozBar

The MozBar is an extension that can be used with Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome to get surface-level metrics including Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) from search results; this can help you vet sites for link building fast. Then use the MozBar to check individual pages for DA, PA, spam score, and linking policies.

Open Link Profiler

OpenLinkProfiler offers extremely fresh link results from its data base which is updated frequently. Its backlink analysis shows you lots of information on the freshest links for any given URL, and lets you filter the result in various ways. OpenLinkProfiler also shows you potentially harmful links to your site and provides anchor text analysis.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a search engine for links from Moz that lets you research backlinks, discover potentially damaging links, and find link-building opportunities.

Outreachr

Outreachr searches a huge number of websites to identify the most influential sites and bloggers in your niche areas based on a list of tags you create. You can also search specifically for things like “useful links” or “guest posting” depending on your back linking goals.

Positionly

Positionly lets you see which sites link to your website and when others build links to your pages.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools provides you with high-quality data on any domain, keyword, or URL and comprehensive backlink data, all within minutes.

ScrapeBox

Use the ScrapeBox Link Checker to scan thousands of pages fast to verify that your backlinks and anchor text exist. You can also use the Mass Link Builder to post comments en masse and use the proxy harvester as a link harvesting tool.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a website crawler that finds permanent and temporary redirects, identifies redirect loops and chains, and reports on all external links and their status codes, all inbound links, and all outbound links for any given page.

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics lets you analyze a site’s search rank, identify its links, monitor its social signals, and track its SEO visibility; its weekly trend data can also show you how Google updates are affecting your pages.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a competitive analysis tool that provides insights into the link building strategies of your competitors.

SEO SpyGlass

SEOSpyGlass checks all of the back links to your site or your competitor’s site, showing you the total number of links and the exact URL of each one.

Simple URLs

Simple URLs is a system for URL management that lets you create, track, and manage outbound links from your page using 301 redirects and custom post types.

SISTRIX

SISTRIX offers Googlebot Sim Tech, their link crawler which simulates what the Google bots do and analyzes links. This tech gives you fresh data on your links and deletes dead links fast.

URL Profiler

URL Profiler is a link auditing and content software that checks your anchor text and backlinks, downloads bulk link metrics from Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, and Mozscape, and uses Alexa to retrieve link, rank, and traffic data without any proxies.

WebMeUp

WebMeUp is a backlink analyzer that is designed especially for smaller businesses that need to identify unique backlinks for SEO purposes; it also lets you audit your link profile and download links from competing sites.

Conclusion

There you have it, a truly comprehensive list of back linking resources to round up this complete guide to link building. Now get out there and build better links!