When it comes search engines, google is still the king, and they are doing everything they can to maintain their lead,   in the name of providing more relevant search results for it’s users, google engineers published blog post which indicated there were 11.8% organic search results will be affected, put it this way, almost 12% of google search results are useless or of low quality. Google started this change almost one 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 linking campaign the old way is the thing of past, probably due to links crammed sites being de-indexed by google.

So what exactly is linking campaign the old way? a large percentage of SEO firms will do this,  they add your links to those linking websites without context, these websites will only be updated when new links are being added, almost all of them are garbage, the name of link spamming sites is justified. New google algorithm most likely will punish these link spammers,  any links on them will be affected too. 

A few real world examples will help to explain what I said. When I got into online marketing long time ago, I started promote the keyword, Reflective Leashes, of course with old way of link building, almost all the sites I got link from had too many links, and the worst thing is that those sites are linking sites only and had no content, not even crap content. In the beginning, the ranking of the keyword in question rise pretty fast, finally the rank improved a lot,   the honeymoon lasted until google changed it’s mind. Here is another keyword, chain puller , most back links for this keyword are from articles and posts, with very few plain links, you can imagine how this keyword ranks. Now contextual links win the battle, then what? In fact the only thing matters here is content, so if you create great content, not only people will love to read your stuff, so do the search engines. It’s never too late to build good blogs for business purpose, for instance let’s examine this one, baby strollers , I didn’t put too much effort into it from start, but I never stopped posting, and to my surprise, I have high ranks for some of  competitive keywords. As we can see, quality blog marketing is much better than plain link building. Now imagine you have your own blog network, for instance Snow Chains, then it will be easier to do article marketing.

Bottom line is that you should create great content, get people to enjoy and share your stuff, and put your keywords in the context you’re good to go, this strategy will prevail in short or long term. Whatever you do, you will need persistence and patience, nothing will automatically 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, let look at some aticles or posts which are published and indexed, say this one, cargo control, nice writing, good content, published on popular site, 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. For wordpress blogs, I recommend twitter tools, get a twitter account and API keys, link your blog to twitter, then every new post on your blog will show up in your twitter page, it’s easy and really useful, it’s a big loss if you don’t use this tool.