Just wanted to refresh this thread and add a few thoughts. I’ve been doing seo on my own sites for years and the changes, while real, are just changes. They’re not the death knell for seo as a form of artificially ranking a site or a page for a certain search term.
The “old” days had us using seo tricks to rank pages full of ads because people would click them trying to find what they were looking for and we cashed in. Over time, people got more and more ad-blind and were increasingly hitting the back button on crap pages rather than clicking the ads.
This is where good content comes in, especially if you want visitors to your page to click your ads or affiliate links. You have to give a visitor something to read that will grab their attention so they’ll stay on your page long enough for you to pre-sell them on whatever it is your page is there to sell. It decreases bounce rate, which Google likes and also satisfies Google’s increasing thirst for more content for it to index.
But content is not everything. You still have to get people to your page to read it. It doesn’t matter if you write the most amazing articles in the world – it won’t mean a thing unless you get eyeballs reading it. To do that you need to attract visitors (traffic) and the best way to do that unless you want to pay for it is to rank it in Google.
To do that, you have to show Google that your page deserves to be ranked.
Google still uses links as its primary ranking metric (despite what Matt Cutts lies to you about). It just counts them differently. A few highly relevant, natural (looking) links are worth thousands of non-relavant, unnatural looking links. Always did to some extent, but do so much more now.
How do you get these coveted links?
Some say you shouldn’t buy them. Bull****. Buy good quality links and they will rank your site, no question. What is good quality? Those on pages with very low OBLs (outbound links), preferably your link is the only one on a page. The page has high PR and is totally relevant to your site/page and its content is original, good quality ie readable not spun crap.
A link like that can cost an arm and a leg. Or you can buy your own high PR site/domain(s), build your own high quality backlinks and cut out the uncertainty of buying links altogether. This will also cost you an arm and a leg, but less in the long run as you only have ongoing costs of hosting and domain renewal.
Whatever you do, avoid putting links on crap pages with spun content that are not relevant to your site. Avoid link farms (Google will find them and kill them – and your site by association – been there, done it, got shafted for doing it) and above all, avoid automated link building to your main site. Use tiered linking where you can (ie create links to the sites that link to your site), but above all, try and keep it as natural looking as you can and you’ll find that seo is alive and well.
That’s enough for this post.