Lately google did something to their ranking algorithm, in the name of providing more relevant search results for it’s users, according to their official blog, this change impacts 11.8% organic search results, in plain English, google thinks about 12% of it’s search results are really bad and need to manipulated. The update was initiated more than a year ago, no wonder I saw a few of my keywords’ ranks dropped like a rock, the good thing is that those keywords promoted by content rich links are not affected, some of the keywords even ranked better than before, it’s obvious that link building the old way is the thing of past, probably due to links crammed sites being thrown away by google.
Now what on earth is plain link building and how do people do it? There are a lot of SEO company out there are doing this, they put your links on websites which only exist for holding links, the content on those sites will never be updated, almost all of them are garbage, the name of link spamming sites is justified. Now google algorithm probably will weed out these sites, any links on them will be affected too.
A few real world examples will help to explain what I said. It was quite some time ago, I started promote the keyword, tie downs , of course with old way of link building, lately I figured that every site in the campaign had way too many links, worst yet, those sites had no content at all. In the beginning, the ranking of the keyword in question rise pretty fast, finally the rank improved a lot, the party was over when google updated it’s algorithm. Here is another keyword, chain pullers, we promoted this keyword with articles and blog posts, not too many plain links have been built, you can imagine how this keyword ranks. So contextual link wins this time, what about future? In fact the only thing matters here is content, as long as you dole out high quality content, you will attract readers as well as search engines. How do you do it? Writing articles and building blogs, such as this interesting blog, cute baby toys , I didn’t put too much effort into it from start, but I never stopped posting, the result? I got nice ranking for a few realy nice keywords now. As far as SEO concerned, quality article marketing is much better than plain link building.
At the end of day all you need to do is to create quality content, get people to enjoy and share your stuff, promote your business with the content, as long as you don’t stop doing this, you will win over customers and search engines. Persistence and patience are the keys to success, you shouldn’t expect things to improve overnight, i.e., selling online or improve your search rankings, keep doing what we have to do till the end of world.