Choose content building over link building every time.

Link building is a very time intensive, mind numbingly boring and repetitive task. No wonder so many people offer services to do it on your behalf.

The trouble is the crappy links they provide are just crap.

High quality links are very hard to come by and can only be gained by having very high quality content that people want to link to.

Or paying high quality prices.

By making such a bold move as to devalue links gained via web spam and blog networks this Google “Penguin” update has suddenly moved the goalposts and left many professional SEO’s with egg on their faces.

Many webmasters are also feeling the full fury of the hurricane blowing through their search results.

Search is evolving and it is slowly getting better with time but this Google update is a watershed moment.

How do you evaluate your chances of competing in an Internet Market?

The traditional way is to take the top four or five search results and examine their link profile. This will tell you how many incoming links they have and where they are coming from.

Then you can start to wonder if you are going to come anywhere close to the amount of links required to rank for your term. In competitive markets that could be two years of link building work.

Links were so important that you could build shitty five page sites and rank with a few well-placed links for long tail keywords.

The power of anchor text in links and link building in general has meant that for many markets people just stopped even attempting to build new sites that were dominated by overly aggressive link builders.

It was thought that with every passing day as you added more links it would make it harder for anyone else to catch you up. And so huge amounts of an SEO budget was spent on link building in the belief that it was a timeless investment.

As long as the internet remained open for business those with the most and biggest links were the winners.

All this has changed with Penguin.

It is a good thing that is for sure.

Of course I feel sorry for those webmasters whose income has dried up overnight.

No one likes to see people who have worked hard for years have the rug pulled from under their feet.

However the warning signs have been flashing for a long time and those who have been relying on aggressive SEO tactics to rank are the biggest losers in this update.

The days of spending hundreds of hours a year building links to your site and then getting nowhere because the competition is building them faster than you are gone.

Now we can focus on what is really important – the content and the user experience.

All of the marketing budget previously allocated to link building can now be channelled into more useful areas.

The biggest winners are content writers.

With web spam being eradicated the horrible pages full of pigeon English and AdSense ads everywhere have mostly disappeared from the top of search.

If they are not gone already then they will be soon. It’s no longer good enough to spin content and call it a site. To be successful you need to build real content with real information and content writers who can actually write have suddenly had a pay rise.

What would you rather spend your money on?

A: 100 links a month package at $500 per month.
B: 10 very high quality articles added to your site every month for the same outlay?

It's a no brainer.

At the end of a year you would have 120 great new pages on your site all feeding you free traffic and making for a greater user experience.

No wonder link building was such a barrier to entry because it ate resources that should never have had to be spent in the first place.

One more thing I should mention about link building is that it is very easily done wrong and can often kill the golden goose which will then never lay an egg. Besides, how can you add quality content to a site and go wrong?

Adding content is where the focus of your efforts should be.

Real; Meaningful, Quality Content.

Not some jackass spun shit.

If you focus on producing quality content and less on gaining low quality links you will build a better site and a better site will stand the test of time no matter what a search engine does in the short term.

General Marketing - Affiliate Marketing