Matt Cutts: �Tell me about your backlinks�

And I was able to tell them why: they had no spam penalties, but Google is getting better at handling paid links, and the paid links that might have helped them last year just weren�t doing them any good now.

As I was standing at our booth at Search Engine Strategies, I was talking with Eric from Performics: Performance - Based Marketing Solutions, that had a booth right next to us. Incidentally, as an aside, Eric grew up in Streetsboro Ohio, moved to Columbus and eventually found his way to Chicago. Northeast Ohio continually impresses me with the quality of people it puts out. Anyway, Eric and I were discussing linking. He wanted to know what my linking strategy was these days. I told him that my 2006 strategy is significantly different that my strategies up until now. Linking just got more expensive. Google is getting really efficient at finding bought links. So, it's simply not a good strategy any more. So what's a linker to do? We've got to get more creative. We need more creative content that will get sites to link to us naturally. I still feel that a company needs to solicit links. But a site should only link to you because they feel you warrant it. That all seems obvious. But up until now, the solution for companies of all sizes was simply to throw money at the problem. It won't fly any more. Now we are going to have to do something much harder. We're going to have to be creative. Creative to the point that our sites actually warrant getting links. Thank god. That's much more interesting for me. Unfortunately, not everyone is a creative genious. There is so much content out there on so many topics that it's pretty hard to get traction simply by being an expert. You need to be an expert with a twist. If you can't come up with that twist on your own, you are going to have to pay someone like me to come up with it for you. "Twists" never come cheap. This is doable for medium and large companies. They can hire the creative talent. But small companies will have little choice other than to come up with the ideas on their own. It is another chink in the armor of the Internet being an even playing field for everyone. Matt Cutts: �Tell me about your backlinks�