Google have spoken about their policy of ranking websites that exhibit authority and high page rank.  They have produced a toolbar option, the  sidewiki  for users to add relevant content to the search engine. During the Vince and caffeine updates, it was an opportunity to monitor traffic to my sites in other search engines.  With Facebook getting a limited integration with Bing, there is a potential for quality links from facebook.

Linkbuilding is becoming less effective, so I am improving my page rank through article submissions with optimised titles and keywords littered throughout. Articles and press releases, if carefully constructed give some quality links. Similarily, directory submissions are still an active part of my SEO, and along with the articles, they have to be submitted to high page rank sites only.

I also noticed that most of the directories that got devalued were the spammy directories, most of the good directories remained the same (page rank wise) or got devalued a bit. I  personally believe that some directories are worth submitting to, but the majority of them are significantly devalued and if you are linking to them it might have negative effects for your website too. I’m still going to build directory links however i will differentiate the good links from the bad quality ones. I still think the best way to got about link building is to use a variety of links, we just have to watch from now on ,and not submit thousands of links to random directories as it will most probably have a negative effect!

Ari