Is link building getting harder? Nah, as more and more people become aware of how links and the anchor text in those links can benefit ones rankings, those people are freely exchanging links with each other. But that also means that the links are not being created for the right purposes, at least in the eyes of the search engines or the searchers. Like all things that get abused, the search engines will eventually take the abuse into account and change the value of links or types of links. So what can you do?
Besides for some of the tactics I already discussed in the link building category, lets discuss one relatively new concept that has been floating around the forums. The concept is to trade articles and content, not necessarily links.
In a post over at the Search Engine Watch Forums, one member discusses how they are using this new strategy:
Here is what we are doing. Instead of trading links we trade new and unique content. That content is placed on a new page linked from a master "Industry Articles" page which is linked into the primary navigation. Within the content are two links, one internal, back to the home page of the main site and one external link to the linked site.If the article pages are link as they should be those pages would soon be spidered by the SE's and develop a PR of their own. The PR does not have to be great because instead of sharing the link value with 20, 50, or 100 other links, you are getting the total outgoing PR value. On top of that the web is being populated not with junk link pages but unique valuable content.
