Google made big changes to the ways their search results rank,   in the hope of offering it’s search users better results, google engineers published blog post which indicated there were 11.8% organic search results will be affected, put it this way, 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, and recently I see some of my ranks were lowered considerably, on the other hand almost all keywords promoted by contextual links are not affected, some of the keywords even ranked better than before, it becomes clear that link building the old way is the thing of past, probably due to link spamming sites being downgraded by google.

So what exactly is linking campaign the old way? 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, almost all of them are garbage, we call these sites link spamming sites. Now google algorithm probably will weed out these sites, any links on them will be affected too. 

Examples will be great for explanation. In the very beginning, I didn’t know better, I needed to rank the keyword, Round Sling, at that time almost every body was doing plain linking campaign, almost all the sites I got link from had too many links, worst yet, those sites had no content at all. This strategy worked in the beginning, eventually the keyword could be found on first page, this was the case until google made the change. Here is another keyword, chain pullers, we put the link in relevant context, almost no plain links, you can imagine how this keyword ranks. So contextual link wins this time, what about future? It all boils down to content, when you create unique and quality content, not only people will love to read your stuff, so do the search engines. How do you do it? Writing articles and building blogs, take a look at this blog, sherri hill , I build it as a hobby and kept adding good or mediocre content, and to my surprise, I have high ranks for some of  competitive keywords. As we can see, quality article marketing is much better than plain link building. Say you’re building your own bogging network, something like Vehicle First Aid Kit, you will have the power to push any sites up in search engines.

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. Ezine is one of the best article directories out there, a new article will be indexed and cached in less than an hour, and some popular blogs will get your post indexed in minutes, there venues are ideal for promoting your site, I believe you should see for yourself,such as Laser Level, good writing, interesting content, indexed and cached, all these points make it perfect for SEO.

Last but not least, we have hot social media now, no one can afford to not using them. One thing you can do for your blogs is to install twitter tools, get a twitter account and API keys, set up API credentials in your twitter tools option, then make sure every new post will post a new tweet, it’s simple and elegant, it’s a big loss if you don’t use this tool.