The end of backlinks, what now?

It used to be that the more external references or citations (links) your website had, the more popular it would be seen by the search engines, and rewarded by way of a high position in the results pages. The quality and relevance metric didn’t really figure, as long as there was link volume, there was a good chance of success (and if your links did have quality and relevance then you would need less links overall. Although in the early days Google wasn’t that clever!). Then SEOs were told that there were certain links that if a website had gained would be considered bad and could have a negative effect on the website. That was great, the day many webmasters woke up to find out that because someone else had linked to their website it was now their problem!

Now we are the juncture where pretty much any link that points to your website could be the cause of penalties that stop it from ranking. For paid advertising open declarations from people like our heavenly father, where specific networks, that offer paid links services, are labeled wicked rank manipulators, and therefore liable for prosecution by Google, in terms of being given a penalty and downgrading the position of the website for keywords in the search engine results pages, are frankly  open admissions that:

Links are still an important factor when seeking to augment a website’s rank in Google.

What’s more by highlighting the websites or networks that are being targeted, Google openly declares the places on the web where companies can purchase links for networks with the goal of creating penalties for their competitors. It’s no surprise to find that there are a number of negative seo services (link) where you can buy these types of services, and there are software tools like Xrumer that will expedite the task for you.

LINKS DON’T COUNT ANYMORE?? Yeah right!

If you’re reading forums or listening to experts that tell you that link building doesn’t work anymore, they are leading you astray. Link building works very well indeed, but – unlike the days of old, relevance and context is EVERYTHING!!

So that’s why I decided to write about a tool I find very useful for what can be quite a mundane task, but done well reaps rewards.