It's good news or bad news depending how you look at it.
Even thought we do not condone the practice, you are able to purchase link building services from many SEO companies that promise lots of good inbound links.
Their strategies vary from blog commenting to creating micro site pages. Blog commenting is usually deleted by the actual blog owners, but the creation of micro sites is something that Google needs to deal with.
A few weeks ago we mentioned "micro sites" when explaining the ins and outs of putting jewelry catalogs on your website. Those are perfectly normal types of micro sites and not at all what an SEO company would attempt as a link building scheme.
We've met some pretty crafty SEO guys in the past few years that employ micro site link building. Their method is to register new domain names for each client and build blog pages for specific jewelry related topics. The domain names usually match the topics.
Every month they create more blog entries with links back to your jewelry website, and the process is never ending. It's never ending because Google would eventually figure out the micro site was part of a link building scheme and reduce the effectiveness of the link building.
Since Google always looks for "fresh" content, the new blog entries would have a honeymoon period of actually helping to boost SEO.
Have you been paying someone for Link Building? Odds are they have used this type of strategy, and perhaps it's been working for you.
It's time to check your Google Analytics again and see if your paid link building is working any more.
According to Google, in April 2012 they finally figured out how to better identify low-quality web pages before they are included in their fresh content index. This means the end of the honeymoon period of link building.
The good news is that, if you've never employed paid link building you should see a boost in rankings. The bad news is that, if you do pay for monthly link building you are just wasting your money now.
We expect to see a new shakeup in web rankings as honest websites bubble to the top of the SERP as those with paid link building drop from the radar
