When the news came out that Wikipedia would be adding "nofollow" attributes to all of the links to external posts, it really was not a surprising move, in my opinion.  Because of the website's high visibility in search, traffic volumes and ability to easily develop, create and "link" content, it should be considered a gold mine for spammers.  It makes complete sense that SEOmoz.org's new YOUmoz feature incorporates the same idea, given the popularity and readership of this website.  There are many talented people that contribute to this site that would never send spam requests to this blog, but I am sure there are many others that do, on a regular basis.  I have a two-year old WordPress blog with next to zero traffic which gets at least 3 or 4 comment spam submissions a day.

My original post on this topic boils down to this message: Link building opportunities get restricted and are being devalued because of the volumes of spam, poorly created submissions and overall abuse of systems in place.  There is an etiquette involved in almost every communication process and the same can be said about link building, no matter what the type of link is that you as a website owner are trying to create.

Here are two examples of link opportunities that once were of a higher value for purposes of SEO:

DMOZ and other web directories

I apologize to the author, but I misplaced the blog post that ID'd Wikipedia as the DMOZ of 2006( added by Rand - there's this post at WMW). There was a time when I could submit to around 20 key web directories and expect a residual benefit in terms of search presence. You made sure to follow the guidelines for quality submissions and if there were no explicit instructions, I kept in mind what the big players in the web directory space required (such as DMOZ, Yahoo and Zeal/Looksmart). That included appropriate titling, avoiding the use of overtly promotional descriptions and the most relevant 4 or 5 keywords.

Not too long ago, you could actually communicate with the editors about your submissions. However, with hundreds, if not thousands of directories in existence today, it's impossible to keep track or submit to every single one (naturally that is). In addition, I can't even imagine what the volume of "junk" submissions are sent into DMOZ today - to a volunteer editorial staff. I personally have a web directory with a Google PR of 2 and less than 100 visitor/day, which gets over 50 submissions a day that are from spammers.

Reciprocal Linking

When webmasters really caught on to the value of a link, it made sense to create general link pages on their sites with the goal of creating inbound links. “What I do for you, you can do for me”. It then evolved into a practice of automatically generating these links and I could submit my website to a “link generator” designed to automatically create link relationships with whoever was in their pool of websites.  So now I have links on my Boston real estate site to e-cards, a European dating service and a web directory of online casinos. 

Are these links relevant to my potential customers? I guess the the answer may be subjective, but somewhere along the way, search engines decided they weren't.  In addition, it became easier to just blind copy about one hundred different "add link" emails instead of really trying to tell a webmaster why there is value or a connection between our websites.  Jim Boykin's blog has my favorite response to poorly crafted link requests.

Thinking About Quality Link Building

There have been and will always be opportunities for website owners to build inbound links to their websites, but we need to take a step back and make certain that what they are trying to do makes sense to the users of our site and the site that we want to obtain an inbound link. Failure to do this results in losing quality link building opportunities because good ideas spiral into easy-to-do or poor tactics in link building practices.

My personal opinion is to always keep the user in mind when looking for link opportunities.  Does this make the process more time consuming?  Absolutely, but it brings more long-term value to a website and to search presence.  One of my roles as an SEO consultant has been to create more opportunities for clients to evaluate on a regular basis for link building campaigns and communication.  This is the strategy that I try to improve all of the time, versus just trying to improve the sheer volume of link requests that go out each day.

I actually had an article rejected from Wikipedia at one point, and while I thought the rejection was highly subjective, in the end I made the best amends possible and learned from my mistake.  I have heard of entire companies actually getting banned from Wikipedia as a result of their poorly crafted articles or edits. 

My final thought is that this is not exclusively an "SEO problem" or a "marketing issue".  It's really about anyone who owns a website and wants to build traffic and revenue for themselves or their businesses.  In the end, people are responsible for building links, promoting websites and are responsible for quality link building practices.