Matt cutts consequences.

[vanguard]

So now that Mr. Cutts has revealed that artificial backlinks are not worth the cost and effort, what is one to do?

Is he specifically referring to paid text link ads and overdoing recips or do his comments extend to all "unnatural" link building which covers most of our current link builiding strategies to some extent:

One way through webmaster requests
Directory submissions
Articles/PR distribution
Recip trades

Are we supposed to have a field of dreams attitude towards link building: if we build it, they will link?

[chorus]

In all honesty, what you refer to as a Field of Dreams policy is exactly what many of us have been doing for years with a good bit of success with.

Do you need to get some links to get the ball rolling? Sure, but that's pretty easy to do.

However this doesn't mean that I have some sort of constant link building campaign going on with my sites. My sites are good enough that once I start to get the word out they collect links all by themselves, without any special effort on my part.

Quite frankly, I decline 99.999% of reciprocal linking requests I get, and I'm sure I don't get them all because of my spam filter setup. If the requesting site doesn't make sense for visitors to my sites the request goes no farther. There's no way I'm going to bastardize my sites in this manner. Period, end of discussion.

IMO it's nice to see the search engines finally catching up with the curve.

[phantom]

Yes and frustrating isn't it? No one would expect a business offline to just open it's doors and wait for traffic to come so I think it's silly to suggest that for an online store.

Promote yourself as you would an offline business - which it appears you're doing and keep building out your store with new products and whatever else your buying public wants. Be practical in your approaches and creative in your marketing plan and sell yourself just like you would if you were on Main Street.

[shruti]

I like to look at it, not from the site owner's perspective, but from Google's perspective, TheDuke. They gain/lose advertising revenue based on numbers of users (ie advertising). If they start showing a bunch of lousy SERPs, their users will go to Yahoo or MSN.

Relevant backlinks likely indicate a relevant page for the SERP. Therefore, it's in Google's best interest to count relevant backlinks higher than those less relevant.

Google isn't in this for the small business, democracy, and apple pie. Google wants to make money--however possible.

The sooner you can get your site in-line with their model, the faster you can reap rewards.