Think Different

No, this post is not an advertisement for Apple Computer, but instead a title inspired by an article written by Eric Ward, “The Coming Link Apocalypse”. Eric’s article is a wake up call to all of us who are employing the same standard and well known link building strategies. Eric writes:

Everyone uses the same tools, the same tactics, the same tricks, the same companies, the same link requests, the same link-ridden press releases, the same approaches, with almost no thought or differentiation.

And this is why many link building tactics people use now—whether they work now or not—ultimately won’t make a difference in your ultimate success or failure on the web.

We are creating a vast gray landscape of marginal links that will not stand out, will not help people, will not give the engines confidence, and which will not really do anything other than make it harder to find anything of value.

The coming apocalypse won’t happen in one terrifying moment. In fact it’s already begun. Search engines are reacting to the worn-out strategies SEOers are using to build links. Search engines will always counter tactics that result in poor, spammy content coming to the top of the SERP’s. Such content dilutes their product – quality, relevant information – and as long as strong content is fighting with irrelevant results the battle between SEO and search engines will never end. Effective link building is going to move out of the mainstream as once reliable methods continue to fail. Methods that have traditionally helped push content search engines deem undesirable.

Don’t wait for your sites to nose-dive in the SERPs if link building is your primary weapon for high ranking. Target specific, semantically related links from authority sites rather than following a saturation strategy that is quickly becoming worthless. I strongly suggest you click the link above and read Eric’s article.

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