Paid link building isn't something a lot of SEOs are willing to openly talk about — not if they do it, anyway. Perhaps that's what makes it a tactic that's mysteriously attractive and so freakin' dangerous at the same time. For this post, I spoke to 10 professional SEOs, asking them for their honest (and anonymous) opinion on paid link building.

Today's an exciting day! Today background tasks are out in Rank Tracker, letting you work with your data, switch between projects and modules, and get more SEO done while your checks are running in the background.

When you prepare to launch a website, it's so easy to forget something in a rush. To make sure nothing is missed, I've prepared this website launch checklist for you with step-by-step instructions.

There's a lot of talk about semantic search in the SEO space. But is Google really giving up on keywords, and should SEOs do the same? What exactly does "optimizing for relevance" mean, how do you do it, and can you rely on it alone? How, after all, does semantic search work, and where do you get started? This article is an attempt to answer these questions.

TF-IDF (short for "term frequency-inverse document frequency") has long been used by Google to figure out the relevance of pages in its index to a given query. Then there was Hummingbird, and then RankBrain. The TF-IDF tool, out today in WebSite Auditor, is an attempt to bring those 3 concepts together to give you data-backed optimization advice in the age of semantic search.

Google rolls out algorithm updates once or twice every month (and that's just the ones we know about!), but not all of them have an equally strong impact on the SERPs. To help you make sense of Google's major algo changes in the past years, I've put up an up-to-date cheat sheet with the most important updates and penalties rolled out in the recent years.

I know, SEO's never been quick or easy. But the entire thing can seem particularly daunting as the search industry evolves. Which of the once effective tactics no longer work? Which of the less popular ones are actually worth it? And what is the best SEO advice for the newbies? For today's post, I asked Bill Slawski, Barry Schwartz, Eric Enge, and other SEO experts these questions.

As you might have noticed, over a month ago Link-Assistant.Com's website has migrated from HTTP to HTTPS. The migration was no piece of cake, but all the effort has truly paid off — we went through the process with no harm to our rankings and organic traffic. And now, as all the dust has settled after the migration, I decided to sum up our experience in this case study, full of practical tips and advice.

I'm about to do a terrible thing. I'm about to ask you to imagine you woke up one morning, looked at your ranking report, and found out that your site's hard-earned rankings are completely gone. You've disappeared from Google's top 100, not a trace left. Nada, nichts, nothingness. I bet it's not the best feeling in the universe.

If you have an HTTPS site (or are about to switch), you know what a pain mixed content is. It's the most common HTTPS-related issue, which occurs when HTTP resources are used on a secure page, and makes browsers display a nasty "insecure content" error to visitors. Mixed Content Checker, out today in WebSite Auditor, finally makes finding and fixing this issue easy.

Negative SEO is a controversial topic in the SEO space. You hear about it a lot, but does it happen a lot? How easy is it to ruin a competitor's rankings, really? Should you be worried? How do you know if someone is trying to knock you out of SERPs with negative SEO? Is there anything you can do to stay safe?

When SEOs talk about the mechanics of Google search, they focus on the ranking signals a lot. The query itself, and how Google modifies it behind the scenes, is usually undeservedly, and entirely, left out. But in reality, search queries go through a series of transformations that affect which results Google will display for them. In today's post, I'll discuss the 7 ways Google refines search queries, how these refinements may work, and what they mean for SEO.

In my 10+ years as an SEO, I've served my fair share of local businesses. Over the years, I've used a number of tools and worked out more than a few hacks to help me be more efficient, productive, and to get more results faster. In this post, I'll share the 17 common problems local SEOs face, along with my own solutions to not only increase a local business site's rankings, but also get the job done much faster.

Ever since Google became a thing, it's been known to use PageRank to rank web pages, and it's still one of the key factors in its ranking algorithm today. Alas, last year Google closed off access to the public version of PageRank, taking away the most reliable metric SEOs used to evaluate site authority and link quality. Since then, we've been working on our own PageRank alternative at SEO PowerSuite, and today — ta-da! — InLink Rank is finally out.

If you asked me to name a single most effective SEO hack, I'd say... Click-through rate optimization. Why? First, a good CTR leads to higher rankings. It's not just my experience: Google's said it, and real-life experiments have proved it. The logic is simple: if lots of people click on the same result, it sends a strong message to Google: "this is the result that people love." Second, more clicks mean more traffic. Even for a #1 Google result, the CTR can range all the way from 5% to 90% - and it's up to you to determine which it will be.

Christmas holidays are far gone, while St. Valentines and Easter are coming close — it's the right time to ask yourself if you're getting the most of seasonal organic traffic and how you could improve on that. In this post, I'll discuss five common reasons for your not getting enough seasonal traffic and will take you through the necessary optimization steps. Let's go!

The long-tail search phrases have always been a bit of a mystery. These low-volume, low-competition terms can be hard to grasp: why spend your time on those keywords if barely anyone is searching for them? Then, there are probably hundreds to thousands of long-tails you can find; how do you pick the best ones? And finally, does any of this even matter in the age of semantic search?

Content duplication is talked about a lot, and we can all agree that you should create unique content for your site's every page. But... In reality, duplicate content mostly arises without the webmaster knowing: server settings and site architecture can trick Googlebot into thinking there're a few versions of the same pages on your site. In this post, I'll talk about the 7 common types of duplicate content and share tips on how you can check and protect your site against them.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is something you can't go to three websites without hearing about these days, but it wasn't always that way. The art of ranking on Google and other search engines is a fairly young beast, but it's still got teeth. Where did it come from, where is it, and most importantly, where is it going?

The year of 2016 was relatively calm for SEOs. But no matter how peaceful the current SEO landscape looks, it doesn't mean you can lean back in your chair and relax! RankBrain, semantic search, AMP, and mobile-first are among the top buzz words of the past twelve months. Penguin and Panda have become smarter and are now part of the core algorithm. To help you brush up your SEO skills, I've prepared a list of recommendations SEOs should focus on for 2017.