Link building is not that easy anymore

You Should Have Seen it. The link building process becomes increasingly difficult. Most of the good, old strategies don’t work any more. You see your traffic going down and wonder what’s happening? Maybe all your SEO efforts are in vain?

Social bookmarking, is it still working?
Social bookmarking sites and web directories are main tools in link building campaigns. But lately, most of them add almost no value to my SEO campaigns. Yes, if you manage to land your article on the first page of the big guys like Digg, you will get a lot of visitors.
For a day or two. But that’s all folks.

Most of these sites use some sort of third party advertising to generate revenue. And most of these advertiser networks have strict rules against links to dangerous websites. The social bookmarking sites can’t afford to check every link because they receive thousands per day. Solution for them was to add nofollow to some or even all outgoing links. Some of them get even further with cloaking links. Now webmasters submit their links, visit the SB websites, link to them but in return, they get nothing. You can submit your article link to hundreds social bookmarking sites and get no visitors and no links at all.

Blog commenting?
With mass usage of nofollow, you’ll only lose your time.

Forum posting?
The same thing. Some forums don’t add nofollow, only until they get enough visitors.

Creating blogs or random pages on the net won’t help you, because they are pages with no value. You must work on any of them to become popular – does it worth its time?

What will be the next, successful SEO strategy?
I don't know. Do you?