Chapter 6: Link Building & Establishing Authority

10x content

Coined by Rand Fishkin to describe content that is "10x better" than anything else on the web for that same topic.

Amplification.

Sharing or spreading the word about your brand; often used in the context of social media, paid advertisements, and influencer marketing.

Brand Authority

A score (1-100) developed by Moz that measures the total strength of a brand.

DA

Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz metric used to predict a domain's ranking ability; best used as a comparative metric.

Deindexed

When a URL, section of URLs, or an entire domain has been removed from a search engine index.

Directory links

"Directory" in the context of local SEO is an aggregate list of local businesses, usually including each business's name, address, phone number (NAP) and other information like their website.

Editorial links

When links are earned naturally and given out of an author's own volition (rather than paid for or coerced), they are considered editorial.

Follow

The default state of a link, "follow" links pass PageRank.

Google Analytics

A tool that helps website owners get insight into how people are engaging with their website.

Google search operators

Special text that can be appended to your query to further specify what types of results you're looking for.

Guest blogging

Often used as a link building strategy, guest blogging involves pitching an article (or idea for an article) to a publication in the hopes that they will feature your content and allow you to include a link back to your website.

Link building

While "building" sounds like this activity involves creating links to your website yourself, link building actually describes the process of earning links to your site for the purpose of building your site's authority in search engines.

Link exchange

Also known as reciprocal linking, link exchanges involve "you link to me and I'll link to you" tactics.

Link Explorer

Moz’s tool for link discovery and analysis.

Link profile

A term used to describe all the inbound links to a select domain, subdomain, or URL.

Linked unstructured citations

References to a business' complete or partial contact information on a non-directory platform.

MozBar

A plugin available for the Chrome browser that allows you to easily view metrics for the selected page, like DA, PA, title tag, and more.

NoFollow

Links marked up with rel="nofollow" do not pass PageRank.

PA

Similar to DA, Page Authority (PA) predicts an individual page's ranking ability.

Purchased links

Exchanging money, or something else of value, for a link.

Qualified traffic

When traffic is "qualified," it usually means that the visit is relevant to the intended topic of the page.

Referral Traffic

Traffic sent to a website from another website.

Resource pages

Commonly used for the purpose of link building, resource pages typically contain a list of helpful links to other websites.

Sentiment

How people feel about your brand.

Spam Score

A Moz metric used to quantify a domain's relative risk of penalization by using a series of flags that are highly correlated with penalized sites.

Unnatural links

unnatural links as "creating links that weren't editorially placed or vouched for by the site's owner on a page."