Loosing Google backlinks

Is Google pushing sites into paid advertising?

[aleksl]

Hi guys,

Our main site has only been around 2 years, so I don't have that much reference.

We are consistently loosing backlinks on Google. After famous Florida update it was the first time MSN surpassed Google as bringing more natural referers. Since then, Google never recovered for us and is consistently #2.

We've lost about 60% of backlinks, going from over 1000 down to some 450. All backlinks were on relevant sites or directories, no FFAs, no spam.

Sometime in last 2 days we've lost 30% of remaining backlinks, this time went down to just above 300. I KNOW there weren't any spam sites or FFAs there, just mostly hard work of myslef and a couple of other folks emailing other webmasters with relevant sites. This basically puts us into position to either
(a) hire a full-time backlink person and start spamming the world, or
(b) buy ads
(c) start creating new site per week, so that we have a network of our own sites backlinking

I would like not to do either - our site is non-commercial. But the way it is going, we'd have to either do this, optimize for MSN, or loose market share.

Anybody else experiencing this shakeout?
Any other ideas how to approach this or when it is going to end?

Thanks

[growingdigital]

I have been on the wrong end of Google updates for almost a year now. I have been focusing on Yahoo exclusively and have been successful with that strategy. Google's back links are not accurate. It has been said this is an attempt to scramble the brain of the SEO.

I do think it's still important to focus on link building regardless of the engine.