The number of people who tried to get their posts to go viral (by writing list posts and publishing images) increased dramatically and, at the same time, Twitter and Facebook REALLY took off. People that wanted to ‘share good stuff’ found these services easier to use for sharing than having a WordPress or Blogspot blog. The result? If you create linkbait and it goes popular, then you should expect a lot of re-tweets/stumble thumbs-ups/Facebook ‘likes’ but a very small number of links from different unique root domains. Do these links from Facebook/Twitter carry any special importance?

Matt Cutts once said in a YouTube video that they rate links from Facebook and Twitter just like any other link! Yay!

One recent lesson I’ve learned about ‘niche’ link building is that you can get viral in your niche community. Take SEO and this blog, for example. I’ve witnessed how different SEOs follow each other and, in case someone has something interesting to share, then other people in the industry re-tweet him and the chain goes on. This is not the case for every niche market unfortunately.

What’s the Future of Natural Link Building? Is it DEAD?!??!

Okay, 3 points here:

  • Many people who link ‘naturally’ have switched to Twitter/Facebook (this is from my personal observations)
  • Matt Cutts said Google treats Facebook/Twitter links the same as any other link
  • Thus, if you want to build natural links, you need to appeal to a VERY SMALL number of people who still own sites and want to link to other resources (very, very tiny minority)

This is, of course, a very ineffective strategy, which is why, in my opinion, you have an increasing number of people who go and hunt for links (that are not natural of course). They can get some great links with great content but the result is re-tweets and so on which aren’t very important in Google eyes.

PLUS, according to some SEOs, people that own websites became stingy because of the ‘do follow’ paranoia of ‘leaking PR,’ so that could be a big factor as well.

What Does the Future Hold?

I am pretty sure Google will start treating Facebook shares/Twitter re-tweets as more than just 1 ordinary link from a same domain. These links will probably become more important for ranking in the SERPs.

The only problem here is spam. If Google starts giving greater importance to Facebook/Twitter, they know people will start spamming these platforms like crazy and new markets will emerge where people will sell re-tweets/Facebook shares depending on the profile ‘authority’.

Let us know your comments.

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