Recently a dark wave went through the search engine optimization universe.

Established practices are being uprooted and the tried and true methods are being questioned–again.

This time it’s one of the oldest techniques, the time-tested practice of acquiring high-quality in-bound links. While we don’t believe the threat is serious, at present, we do think this is a good time to look at the whole link-based structure of the Internet, and how link-building came to be as important as it is at present.

First up: a little history.