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It used to be different earlier, I would say for the good. Link building a.k.a link acquisition used to be a mechanical labor process, in which we would start the process by searching for directories, get the relevant links, start emailing the relevant sites, and then start begging or buying the links. As I got more experienced, I found that many Blogs/sites have got a wide area network which link to each other not because they think it will better the SEO of their websites, but because they had genuine reasons for doing so.
Moreover, with the Google search algorithms (yes, there isn’t really a reason to believe the other ones!) getting intelligent day by day, it makes sense to buy/get “white hat” kind of links for the site for achieving greater legitimate and relevant traffic for one’s site. And with Web social media changing and now back-links being available for just about anyone who has got a point—Yeah, I am talking about the power of Digg, Reddit, and Stumble, which give powerful back-links to just about anybody with good content.
The Viral marketing has already “shifted” in many ways. Now it gives a greater platform for naïve bloggers to market the blogs without any external effort, and gives companies like us a chance to analyze and take advantage of the Social media marketing. We sometimes even suggest the clients not to buy links and instead rely on deeper tactics such as content embedding and long tailing for “longer” results.
With more and more user data available to search engines like Google, one wonders how the algorithms are going to adopt to give the users some “real time” links and suggestions instead of just relying on some calculations based on back-links. The algorithms are definitely accounting for the potential “misses”, which will be improved as the days go by.
Few more things that are changing the way link building is viewed are:
As the market evolves, we have to hope that we still are able to bear the fruit in a forest where every tree is fighting for resources.