I was reading an interesting post about what link building today is really all about… building relationships.

Eben Pagan talks about this a lot in his teachings and systems.

His main goal is to provide them such valuable content they’ll have no choice but to link to it.  He does this instead of having some cheap looking banner ad that rarely gets clicked on. His goal is to have an extremely valuable editorial content piece that most people will WANT TO CLICK ON.

In social spaces like FB this is even more important.

The web is definitely moving to a more interactive platform based system.  The big sites like Facebook Wikipedia and YouTube are all community sites with lots of user generated and driven content.

Google is swiftly jumping on the bandwagon (in addition to their purchase of YouTube).

About a year or two ago they bought the social networking site Orkut.  Unfortunately for them this never really took off as they had envisioned and it’s mired in the distant rearview mirror of the two big sites Facebook and MySpace.

So Google has changed their strategy.

They are currently in the very early stages of rolling out their own social platform largely based on the research they did when they were considering buying digg.

After looking at Digg’s raw data and server files they got lots of good information on what a social sites is and what is valuable information to people.  This will soon be integrated into their search results and the way people get information from Google.

Here is a direct quote from The Official Googleblog on the direction they’re headed their search results

“As we’re already seeing, people will interact with the cloud using a plethora of devices: PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, and games. But we’ll also see a rush of new devices customized to particular applications, and more environmental sensors and actuators, all sending and receiving data via the cloud. The increasing number and diversity of interactions will not only direct more information to the cloud, they will also provide valuable information on how people and systems think and react….. As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individuals situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.”

Which I first found at link building future tips

You can see their emphasis on inter-act and the overall engagement people have with content websites as opposed to the old method of just build a bunch of links and that’s what people find relevant.

Google has already secretly and quietly rolled out some of their features to address this shift.

Their Chrome browser will give them direct usage statistics of what people find relevant.  And Google reader will also give them in-house statistics of what blogs people are actually looking at, how much time they’re spending reading, and what they choose to bookmark and share with their friends.

These are just two of the changes Google has rolled out and there will be much more to come as the brave new world of the web continues to grow up.

Join the Dedicated Facebook group for the plain-speaking way to handle the changes and staying out front of them for maximum success.

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