So much is said and written about link building and about what link popularity could do for your website, you’d think some people had found the lost elixir of the alchemists. But one thing can never be mistaken: link building is a job that never ends. Think of the trajectory of a rocket. If you point it straight up in the air or at a slight incline, and send it off, it will eventually hit a peak and then plummet straight back to Earth. It’s not that unrealistic to think of link popularity in the same way. Websites achieve great success over time, and very few websites can fool search engines into thinking they’re still popularity if the links to them fall off over time.

Since the modern search engines keep historical data, it’s easier to think in terms of what you have to do continously to succeed. For this reason alone, you need to have more than one method of link building, and they must be methods that are reliable and proven to work in the long haul. Needless to say, they also should be link building techniques that are amenable to your moral, legal, and social concious as well.

One of the easiest methods to ensure that your website is getting a relatively uniform number of links evey month is to post often and make your content accessible via RSS. Blogs are the perfect vehicle for doing just that, so if you haven’t made blogging a part of your daily link acquisition routine, you might be missing out one of the most potent internet marketing moves available to you at no charge.

Almost all websites will likely experience a link popularity peak, but the key might be to keep it not too dramatic. If you’re featured on the news or on a prestigious website, you’d see a peak followed by a lessening of your acquisition rate, but the decline wouldn’t be like falling off a cliff, either. As the profile of your website increased, the profile, quantity, and quality of the linking websites would also change, usually for the better. This is undoubtedly a great reason to keep historical data and to do extensive data mining to improve capabilities. Link popularity is the core of almost all of the search engine’s algos these days, and using the historical data of leading websites could help increase relevance and quality immensely. Google, in particular, has dropped a number of clues that emerging quality factors like this one would eventually affect search rankings pages.

Do you give any thought to the rate at which you acquire links? Is link building part of your daily job? I’d love to hear your thoughts.