Building links used to be all about just getting a backlink and that was it. It didn't really matter how or from where; so long as you were getting them you were golden. That was a long time ago, and as with everything on the internet things quickly evolved. A few years ago, link farms were all the rage, of course they were not called link farms back then. They worked fine, until webmasters found a way to abuse the system and get thousands of links from them overnight. After that came the link directories, which unlike link farms were a little more sophisticated and organized.

Link directories are a great way to get your homepage spidered quickly, maybe even grab a visitor or two if the Directory is of high quality and your link is very attractive. The effectiveness of link directories has dwindled dramatically due to the many automated software systems and sites that'll submit your link to thousands of them overnight. It's just not what SE's would call a high quality link...

Just recently, link exchanges or reciprocal link building sites and programs were all the rage. Give me a link and I'll give you one right back. When the SE's caught on to them, they evolved into 3 way link exchanges, I'll give you a link, you give them a link and they'll give me a link. Seemed like the perfect solution, and to this day still works quite well to get links to your Homepage...

All of these systems have three inherent problems in the eyes of the Search Engines:

1. They create links to your homepage only 2. They are systems easily manipulated by the webmasters 3. They provide very little value, if any, to the end user, in this case the visitor

It was inevitable that, eventually, the Search Engine's would have to do something about this; they would have to find a better way to qualify, justify and rank backlinks. After all, links are the backbone of the internet. The result of this changed the way the Major Search Engines look at the links on your pages and more importantly, the backlinks pointing to your pages.

They took a 180 degree turn altogether!

Instead of looking at the way the webmaster had optimized their site or what links were coming and going, the Search Engine's turned their focus to what the end users' behavior was when clicking on or following those links!

The main indicator of quality, relevancy and validity of the links now lies in the end users behavior. When looked at from the Search Engines' point of view, this makes perfect sense.

Here's the logic behind the madness and why the SE's trust this information far more :)

To begin with, the webmaster has little to no control over the end users actions, so this is very unbiased and raw feedback. Let's walk through a typical scenario.

A visitor is on your site, maybe the homepage or maybe an inner page, they are interested in the content on your site and they spy a link which catches their eye they click on the link and it takes them to another page...

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