Google has begun drastically cracking down on many link promotion methods that webmasters use. They have started systematically discounting paid links, directory links, signature links, and other links that a webmaster creates for themselves. In addition, Google has started penalizing sites that buy or sell links, or otherwise try to create “artificial links” for themselves.

As far as Google goes, the only safe way to gain links seems to be organically. An organic link is a link that another webmaster puts to you on their own, without being encouraged or asked by you. These natural links are hard to get, though.

This is going to make it very hard on newer websites. How are they going to get started? They will be stuck in a catch 22 caused by Google. They cannot get popular without getting natural links, but they cannot get natural links without being popular. You only get natural links by getting a lot of people who come to your site, and a few of them happening to be webmasters who have a website that would benefit by linking to you.

For the most part, the only new websites able to get enough traffic to get those natural links will be the websites with a huge amount of money to spend on advertising, marketing, and promotion. Google has hindered the little guy by creating a catch 22 for people without the huge amounts of money required to get natural links for a new website.

Anyway, once you have traffic and rankings, you can get more natural links by ensuring that you have a great website to which other webmasters will want to link.

What do you think?