Mike McDonald of WebProNews recently interviewed Matt Cutts of Google at PubCon in Las Vegas. In this interview Matt offered insight on the future of SEO/SEM and Google’s move toward becoming a comprehensive social media portal.

Matt Cutts also talked about the new trends in Search Engine Marketing in recent years, stressing the shift from traditional marketing approaches to a more social and contextual medium. With this evolution, marketers with the best and most original ideas such as linkbaiting will see higher conversion rates as a result of their search engine marketing campaigns. Less desirable techniques such as affiliate spam and paid links are losing their importance with this evolution.

There is another interesting interview with Rand Fishkin, Lee Odden, Todd Malicoat – three of the more influential names in the SEO world. They discussed some of the important aspects about linking and linkbaiting.

From these discussions we can conclude that growing a natural link pattern is important to maintaining a positive search ranking and avoiding costly penalties.  Purchased links or link campaigns anchored on PayPerPost and ReviewMe (if without nofollow) links might be inviting trouble from Google. So it is vital to keep your link profile natural (themed links from a host of sources) and go after sites that aren’t listed on any ‘bloggers for hire’ directories. Unnatural link profile, such as 80% of links from press releases, 80% from sitewide links might logically trigger an automated or human review. Social media optimization would also be essential white hat method for driving traffic to websites.

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