My story with seo and links started 6 years before when it was enough to get few inbound links pointing to your website with your keyword in the anchor text to rank among the top 10 in the SERP for some highly searched keywords. I was quite happy to find out about that and I saved no time to start building links toward my website and the search engine traffic spiked in a crazy manner.

It didn’t take thousands of webmasters a long time also to figure out that which make it harder and harder to rank well for competitive keywords and the few inbound links stop doing the job for you, it is now about hundreds or thousands. I kept expecting all that time that search engine will reduce its dependency on links as most webmasters are familiar now with the role of links in the SERP, but it looks it was very hard for search engine to find any good alternative (at least for the mean time), what search engines tried to do instead is to put strict guidelines to stop webmaster from manipulating this factor, Google was the leader in that as it changed the TOS page to clearly declare that buying links is a prohibited, it didn’t stop here, Google has added a form to report paid links.

Did that tell you anything? It is clearly tells that Google has failed to reduce the dependency on links in their algorithm (they have done a good job to decide the quality of inbound links) but they are going after those are trying to manipulate this factor. So there is no much changes, links still the most important factor in ranking websites but what changed is the way of getting them.
Google has good success in filtering some artificial link building technique algorithmically like:
1- Link exchange.
2- Blatantly paid links i.e links marked as sponsor, link cloud in the footer or the side bar of website.
3- Links from directories.
4- Links from network websites.

Many other sorts of artificial link building are being filtered by human interference like the report paid links form and other Google employees activities.

How to be ahead in the game:
You don’t need to wait until Goolge being able to filter all artificial link building technique (you can still bet on quick wins if you want), to be ahead in the game you need to go back to a very old seo statement “When it comes to search engine optimization content is king”, I know it is very hard to generate quality content but you can not maintain your good position for a long time without the good content, the good news for you with the internet connection getting faster and the machines/software getting more powerful content now going beyond the text, it is now:
1- Images.
2- Vides.
3- Widgets.
4- Audio
5- Games

ETC

Are you still not sure how will that drive links to your website? Ok I will explain it for #1 images; If you are reading blogs frequently you will see that bloggers are obsessed with images, most blogs will include one or more images and most of those blogger leave a link back to the source of the images with text like “Image Credit” “Image courtesy”.

So for now keep doing the artificial link building but if you think you want to stay in a good ranking for a long time in future then start putting your content strategy soon.

Paid directories submission is on of the most popular technique that many seo companies and use for build links, it is affordable easy and doesn’t fall latterly under buying links even if it is.

If you are good seo and try to keep your self updated with the new industry news you should noticed that Google has penalized many paid directories last week (i.e Aviva directory, Alive directory and more), does it mean Google is trying to kill the link building technique? My be.

While I tried to figure out what has pulled the trigger for this penalty I have found out that most of those directories are involved in kind of link building for the sake of PR/inbound links number and all of them offer packages like if you want your anchor text to be keyword rich upon your choice not the name of your company then you need to pay almost double amount, unlike other directories like Yahoo and BOTW where you don’t have this choice, actually anybody sees this choice will know that this just for the sake of getting some search engine love, in other words manipulating search engines, Personally I like this choice but I cant see it is totally clean. Most of those directories are less of 3 years of age which means they are almost new comparing to other directories like Skaffe, Joeant and BOTW etc.

Finally what I am trying to say is that this technique has not died, it just has new rules now, you need to care about the quality and authority of paid directories before you do any submission, I will try to list few directories those I think they would not penalized buy Google in future and they will keep passing link love to website listed on them:

http://botw.org/
http://dir.yahoo.com/
http://www.skaffe.com/
http://www.joeant.com/
http://www.business.com/