1. Start a blog and focus on writing unique articles with great content


2. Ignore link building methods and drive traffic to the articles through social networks like digg and stumbleupon.


3. Determine if popularity on major social media sites translated into more incoming links.

And the results? Well here are the findings…

Social bookmarking sites do not equal more links.

Social bookmarking (Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Propeller) currently SUCKS if you want to build good links (for popular posts that got 30k+ views, I barely got 2-3 links from PR2-3 sites who feature daily ‘interesting sites' so those are not that valuable links.)

Google mantra "Build great content and users will find you" isn't valid anymore.

I've realized that building great content is just one piece of the puzzle (so I'm not saying building great content is bad, I'm just saying it's one piece of the puzzle, not everything.)

It's certainly a very interesting test that reinforces the important role of link building in any well rounded SEO campaign. If you are keen to read the full post, you can check it out here.