Google and its team are always telling you this: Create top quality content that people want so that they will link you and recommend you to others. This seems no longer working, despite how much Google is trying to convince you the otherwise. Here’s why.

Darko Johnson, the owner of MixTheNet, did just that – for 6 months, he built great content on MixTheNet, with 90% focus on the content and 10% on manual link building.

The content themselves are great – they went to Digg front page several times, and one even gets 800+ diggs. The same also happens with StumbleUpon, in which an article is getting 110,000+ views.

However, views don’t seem to be translated into stronger backlinking. Darko barely got 2-3 links from PR2-3 sites, while one link is a PR7. Putting 10-day writing high quality content effort and getting 400,000 views to get such number of links is simply a poor Return-On-Investment in term of link building.

Bottom line, link building using social bookmarking sites sucks.

Darko concluded, “Google mantra ‘Build great content and users will find you’ isn’t valid anymore. The fact they still spread this propaganda makes me sick.”

My opinion

Well, in my opinion, link baiting with your blog is no longer as effective as it was. Hoping for someone to link to your quality content is just the same attitude of “just build it and they will come” in off line world: It has proven to be not working and it also won’t work in the future.

Just like in the off line world, you need to market, promote, evangelize your “products” (in the case of blogs, blog posts.) Creating great stuffs should be every blogger endeavor; but creating great stuffs hoping for quality back links is just a waste of your time.

Like what Darko mentioned in his case, there is a disturbing trend that people are excessively using the “nofollow” tag, especially the big sites, hoping for them preserve their PageRank by preventing link juice to leak to other sites. This will make natural link building a more pain in the @ss, if not useless.

As of for me, I think I should look more on non-natural whitehat, greyhat, even blackhat link building techniques. Why? Because whitehat SEO is not longer valued as it was (and should) by Google.

Read and reread Darko Johnson’s full article here: Case Study: I Listened to Google and I Failed.

Any opinions on this? If so, please leave a comment to this article.