When we talk about SEO link building we are trying to focus on link building that have real SEO effect and value, and we are pointing out that all what we will discuss here will be true only for this kind of link building.

In the past all link building strategies had some SEO and ranking effect, but now after all Google updates, some strategies have no effect and others have negative effect.

So what changed?

Everything had changed in the SEO, while once there was a clear road-map to how to get to top search engine ranking, now there is nothing; now we know what works, and you can follow what work and only hope for higher ranking.
Before, for example, time was critical, and only old domains and old pages were getting high ranking, today it has no effect. although you need time to establish some authority to your domain, but after that you can have a page ranked at the top almost in hours, you can publish a video and make it rank at the top of Google search result after hours.

So my first tip to you now is to ignore what you have learned about SEO and link building while reading this article, and try to understand the following information without comparing it to your previous knowledge and what other bloggers and SEO experts may told you.

SEO link building best practice after penguin 2.

The first question everyone is trying to find an answer for is: “what is the ideal mix for the 4 elements of link building, quantity, quality, diversity, and velocity”?

I can play the game of experts by giving you some numbers and percentage and show you some charts and fancy info-graphics to impress you; but the truth is you are the only one who can determine the ideal mix. Knowing that we all choose quality over quantity, but if you are trying to rank for the “magic keywords” that have huge competition, you know that quantity is always the name of the ranking game.

So depend on your competitors, your keywords and your market you need to find the ultimate mix between all the 4 elements. However today after the latest penguin 2.0 was finally in place, you need to choose quality over quantity, high diversity and slow velocity.

The idea here is that even if your competitors have tens of thousands of backlinks, you still have a great chance of over ranking them, only if you have better content, quality of backlinks growing organically and naturally. A steady stream of quality backlinks from variety of sources especially authority and relevant sources can guarantee you high ranking in the search engines.

A simple research or monitoring of Google first page results for your keywords will show you how difficult to understand the ranking algorithm, the behavior of Google is really impossible to understand, except the results from YouTube there is no logic behind all the results shown in the first page, and most of the results will disappear really fast.

So not me, not anyone, not even Google itself can give you a real road-map of ranking. Google now rely more on content and value through social signals, the value of link building is a real mystery.

So my own recommendation to you is to stop link building in terms of SEO, and start link building in terms of traffic.

The best solution of internet marketing these days after the chaos of Google penguin, is to look for traffic elsewhere, finding good sources of traffic and attract traffic from them to your blog or website is the way you need to focus on from today on. But don’t worry, doing that you will increase your search engine ranking and enhance your SEO.

What I am trying to say is, start looking at link building in terms of traffic generation, place links on pages and on a way to attract traffic.

Let’s give some examples, shall we?

1. Forum marketing, and getting backlinks from forums, in the past everyone start to getting backlinks from forums through profile pages, it has no value in terms of traffic, but it was good for SEO, now it has no meaning, maybe negative value in terms of SEO. But getting backlinks from related forums through the thread, posts, and signature is a great way to get traffic, especially when you share high value content through your threads and posts, people will click on your signature to read more of your content. It is a great way to get traffic and back link have great value.

2. Guest posting, it is one of the greatest link building and authority building strategy, when writing a great content and publish it on high traffic blogs, you are creating a good reputation and getting high value backlinks, but let me add one more important tip here; if you can get a backlinks from the content itself it is way better than having a bio, always think in terms of traffic, how would you get the reader’s attention and make them click through to your website.

3. Press Release will always be a great source of traffic, authority sites like press release sites and news sites are also great source of backlinks. But again write for people not search engines.

As you can see our best SEO link building strategy post penguin is link building through content writing and publishing, and the reason for that is simple:

You remember the multi tier link building, some SEO experts still consider this as a good link building strategy, but honestly we hate that and we think it is a huge mistake and waste of time and effort. Multi tier link building is when you build backlinks from pages on authority sites, then create 2 tier links to those pages, and maybe build a 3 tier links and so on. In this strategy you are trying to give high page rank and authority to the pages that links to your money site, and it’s like you are trying to cheat Google by building worthless links to pages not on your domain to protect your money site.

But I will never understand why would anyone work hard, spend time and money building backlinks to someone else domain name?

Now Google also detect this kind of strategy, and the negative effect of penguin is also going deeper and deeper.

Content is the king, but not only on your website, it is the king is terms of link building; when you are building links from content rich pages you are creating traffic channels to your pages and building authority and trust.

So it is a good idea to create content rich pages on other authority sites, and link back to yours, but it will be enough to create some social signals to that page, and the content will do the rest, don’t put any effort building backlinks to that page.

If you still want to use the multi tier link building strategy, it will be a good idea to start your own private networks.

My recommendation of SEO Link Building services and tools after all Google updates:

There is always good high quality SEO and link building experts who can adapt their services really fast to any algorithm change, don’t forget that for them SEO is their business, and they spend thousands and sometimes millions of dollars to stay in this business and grow their business. Even though we always suggest that you need to stop using any service after an update, and take a time to slow things down. But the speed of internet require using SEO and link building services to have better chances of competing and ranking.

So here are some of my top recommended services and tools that may help you out, all of them are proven to be penguin safe, and have a great results post penguin.

1. Unique article wizard, Still the top most effective content marketing solution ever created, I am sure you already know about it.  I am using this service for 3 years now with great satisfaction, and are getting only better and better. Now you can get social signals through their unique exchange service, you can have the content written by their expert writers, and you can create your own private blog networks without spending any time and money. The have the ultimate solution for content marketing. You can read this short post about Unique article wizard here.

2. Backlink Magic is a new service to solve the problem of guest posting, we all know how hard guest posting is, the time it require to find good relevant authority blogs with high traffic, getting approved for guest posting and writing those posts. Backlink Magic can do this for you for small investment. We have seen some great results with this service and i strongly recommend it. We are affiliates with this program and we do promote them as affiliates, they have a great affiliate program, but also we are using their service and we highly recommend their service

3. Total content domination, this service was created for bloggers to solve the problem of content, but now after the huge increase on content marketing for SEO, they have upgraded their service from just getting content to your blog, to content marketing for SEO needs.

I know you have too many question about SEO Link building, and I also know I cannot answer all your question, but i hope I did draw a better picture for you to see more clearer what is going on in the SEO today. And allow me to repeat my golden tip once more, Stop thinking about what search engines want, and start thinking what your readers want.

Good luck and please feel free to share any idea you have.