This article starts at a time when if I offered any smart webmaster the choice of #1 spot in Alta Vista for just a single day or #1 spot in Google for the rest of the year he'd take the Alta Vista, thank you very much. Yes, a long time in internet years.

Who killed Link Building?

Google did. They created it. And then they killed it. Dead. In the beginning there was no Google. There were directories and other search engines that operated in a vastly different way to the current Google behemoth. When Google came along they established themselves largely on one unique selling point: Their way of establishing relevance for any given search phrase. For the first time ever a search engine used a citation based model where every link was considered a vote for the page it was linking to. They called it Page Rank and it was the mainstay of their algorithm. Simplistically put: pages with more incoming links ranked better. Of course, nobody could predict how large a market share of Search Google would control. For a small and insignificant search engine it didn't make sense for webmasters to spend time and money chasing links in an attempt to improve their ranking.

But, as Google got bigger and bigger, it became more and more worthwhile to hunt for links. And to exchange links, beg for links, pimp for links or plain steal them (drive-by blog spamming). A whole industry build up around links. From the simple web-rings you now had link exchange programs, automated links exchange programs, link clubs, links in forum signatures, buying and selling of links, buying and selling of sites for PR (links), link cooperatives and a whole new lexicon from "link tarts" to "guest-book spamming" to "no-follow tags".

The value at a rock concert is the sound. But when millions of other people are making their own unrelated sound and amplifying it with sophisticated tools then you can't hear the music anymore. And the link noise was disrupting Google's way of determining relevance. If they stuck with their links-determine-importance algorithms they were easy prey, their results could be manipulated by people with the most money/best technology, searchers would lose respect in Google to churn out relevant results. So, Google had to evolve and they had to drop links as the main and sole arbitrator of value. It wasn't in their interest to tell you or me about the change... so they didn't.

Why does content replace link building?

If they were not using citations as the sole determinant of rankings they had to find something else. And it had to relate to what the users wanted. If users were searching for content on how to improve their ranking in search engines they didn't want a page of links, they wanted an article like this one giving them information or a perspective on the subject of their current interest. Google figured this out a while ago and started making subtle changes to their algorithms to reward content.

Webmasters weren't far behind. They cottoned on that sites with a lot of content seemed to be well rewarded and that started the rush for content. They figured, in fact, that the content didn't even need to make sense. In a fashion similar to the earlier rush - innovation and money made a lot of difference. Whether Google predicted it or not they were under attack again. Programs that auto-generated thousands of pages of useless text started going mainstream. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of webmasters were feeding in seed keywords for the autogenerators to pump out the trash. Then there were the scrapers: Take a small bit of text for each site but if you do that enough times you have a lot of content. And the translators: Take someone's 100,000 word English site, translate it to German via one of the free webtranslator services - which largely mangle the syntax and content to an unintelligible mush - and translate it back to English again (double-mangling, if you will) and you've got a non-copyrighted volume of content using your chosen keywords (together with semantic relatives).

If content doesn't work, what does?

So, to the bitter truth and something you don't want to hear: Churning out content is not blackhat or whitehat anymore, it's old hat. To succeed in the SEO game you need to be one step ahead of the search engine, one step ahead of what all the other SEOs are doing. Writing articles WAS the new link building. Things have moved on and you can read about Long Term SEO here: experienced-people.co.uk/1063-understanding-search-engine-rankings/long-haul-seo.htm. Yes, that's the purpose of this article: It isn't content for content's sake and it's not even reproduced on our website to bulk out the content there. It's to emphasise Quality Content. The new trick in town is understanding how Google makes the Quality judgement... and manipulating it.

Happy search engine results for all your sites.