To me, Google sometimes seems like a big crocodile in a pond, sick of eating the same old catfish every day. Whenever it hears a new sound, something new, it snaps it up, only chomping the occasional catfish when there is nothing else around.

Blogs from the old original blogging engines like Google’s own ‘blogger’ and traditional websites are like the catfish – Google is just not interested. They seem to take forever to get indexed and back-links from link exchanges and directories, sometimes I think I’ll be retired before I see them have any real impact on a listing. But throw a fresh video to the crocodile, 8-10 hours. Indexed and showing on page one within 8 to 10 hours. Social Networking or Web 2.0 too. See the back-links from these sites working within days.

Why?  Well you have to go back to what keeps Google at  number 1 and makes it the most valuable piece of real estate on the planet:  relevance. When you do a search with Google you find what you want and if link exchange alone did that, the results page of any search would look like last year’s Newsweek: The same stale old sites that are accumulating more and more back links.

Web 2.0 content is fresh, happening, exciting. The web 2.0 portals also seem to have successfully kept the lid on spammers to the extent that they haven’t destroyed the experience as they were able to do with forums, blogs  and  earlier social networking tools.

There is still a place in the top 10 for the occasional old catfish, but woe betide any seo company who thinks they will keep their clients in the top 10 with back-linking alone. They will go the way of the dinosaurs.