Lately google made some changes to their rank algorithm, in the name of providing more relevant search results for it’s users, on official google blog it is estimated 11.8% search results will be affected by this update, put it this way, there are about 12% of google search results are considered low quality by google itself. They planned and started the update about one year ago, no wonder I saw a few of my keywords’ ranks dropped like a rock, on the other hand almost all keywords promoted by contextual links are not affected, and a few of them even gained a few positions, it’s almost a sure thing that plain link building loses all it’s attraction, at least in the eye of google.
Now what on earth is plain link building and how do people do it? a lot of marketing companies did and are doing the plain link building, they put your links on websites which only exist for holding links, the content on those sites will never be updated, and most of them are useless, the name of link spamming sites is justified. The latest google update will definitely downgrade most if not all of these sites, all the links on those websites will have the same fate.
Maybe a few examples will make it clear. It was quite some time ago, I needed to rank the keyword, load bar, at that time almost every body was doing plain linking campaign, lately I figured that every site in the campaign had way too many links, and those sites had only links, no real content at all. In the beginning, the ranking of the keyword in question rise pretty fast, eventually the keyword could be found on first page, this was the case until google made the change. Now let’s look at another keyword, chain pullers, most back links for this keyword are from articles and posts, not too many plain links have been built, now we have really good ranking for this keyword. Now contextual links win the battle, then what? In fact the only thing matters here is content, so if you create great content, your rank will improve over time, since search engines are another kind of readers. You probably think there are already too many blogs out there, it’s not true, there will never be too many good blogs, such as this interesting blog, best baby strollers , I build it as a hobby and kept adding good or mediocre content, it’s no way this site will rank, right?, actually, no, in actuality my site is ranking high for some nice search phrases. As far as SEO concerned, quality article marketing is much better than plain link building. Say you’re building your own bogging network, such as car tire chains, then it will be easier to do article marketing.
At the end of day all you need to do is to create attractive content, publish and share with people, promote your business with the content, this strategy will prevail in short or long term. Persistence and patience are the keys to success, long term strategy is required to improve anything of significance, be it your business or search rankings, let’s keep building and maintaining our blogs until end of the day. One of the best articles directories is EzineArticle, new article will be indexed within an hour if not minutes, and some popular blogs will get your post indexed in minutes, there venues are ideal for promoting your site, let look at some aticles or posts which are published and indexed, say this one, grade 80 binder chain, nice writing, good content, published on popular site, all these points make it perfect for SEO.
We’re not finished yet, please remeber, we have hot social media now, no one can afford to not using them. For wordpress blogs, I recommend twitter tools, sign up for a twitter account and create a new application, configure your twitter tools prpperly, then make sure every new post will post a new tweet, it’s easy and really useful, it’s a big loss if you don’t use this tool.