WebmasterWorld members wonder why link building has become more difficult. Years ago, it would be easy to ask a webmaster to create a link on his/her site to point to your site. But now, everyone is requiring reciprocity or they don't respond at all. Why is this happening?

Link building has become a lot more mainstream as people understood that value that search engines place on links. Matt Probert makes a good argument:

Its the same old story that accompanies all SEO. We link to sites because the link may benefit our readers. That is the only reason. With so many sites linking to so many other unrelated sites the benefit to the user is minimal, its just a game of SEO forgetting that readers are the target, and while SEO tricks and manipulation may encourage larger quantities of initial visits, they wont attract back quality users.

That's what other people echo. Link building is so mainstream that it's being abused nowadays. Link building may not be relevant to the sites that you request links from. And people are not providing the correct information regarding link exchanges.

There's a lot of great information in this post as to why link exchanging just doesn't go as it used to anymore. We'll miss the good ole days.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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