What Has Changed in SEO? | Whiteboard Friday Revisited With Cyrus Shepard

Links still matter; that hasn’t changed. While tactics have evolved, they are still one of the key signals search engines use to understand authority. 

In the original Whiteboard Friday video, Cyrus confides: “No, kidding. Everybody hates link building. Link building is so hard. There are some professionals and some great people in the industry who love it and are great at it. Personally, I’m not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.”

So how? Cyrus simply encourages you to make people look good. If you’re going to create content that people want to link to, what we call passive link building (also called Digital PR in the UK.) 

“If you can create something that helps someone do their job, that they want to brag about, that they wanna share, that they can include in their own presentation because it’s data or anything else like that, that’s gonna get the links. Make other people look good. Make content so good that other people wanna steal it. That’s gonna get your links. That hasn’t changed.”

Cyrus mentions he has done active outreach link building maybe 5 times in his career, and yes, we should all be making content so good that people want to steal it. 

If you are doing the manual work of link building and need to identify link placements, then Link Intersect in Moz’s Link Explorer is still the best place to start. Why? Because when you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to link to you. I still have people hit me up in my DMs with content, and if it’s worthwhile, then yes, you do want people to know about it, and sometimes that takes a little nudge. Like all these tactics make it natural and lead with high value contentand the rest will follow.

To find link opportunities for a site in Link Explorer, follow these steps from within the Link Intersect section:

1. Enter the site you’d like to find link opportunities for – you can use the drop-down to specify if you’d like to see opportunities for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page
2. Use the drop-down to choose whether you’d like to see link opportunities that are root domains or exact pages
3. Enter your competitors – you can use the drop-down to specify if you’d like to see data for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page
4. Click Add another URL to add up to 5 competitors to compare
5. Click Find opportunities