I like Rand's proposed solution, and I'm confident that the folks at Google can come up with something even better and more effective. I'm finding that natural

I like Rand's proposed solution, and I'm confident that the folks at Google can come up with something even better and more effective. I'm finding that natural link building is getting harder and harder. Much of this is because social media sites (that often use nofollow) are now how people talk about stuff they like. And when they do have a Tumblr or Wordpress.com blog, the links aren't very valuable. Most of the valuable links that I've been able to build lately have come from my asking people to link to my sites. In a way, we're seeing more and more PageRank inequality. The people who control the sites with the most link equity know what they have, and they're not willing to share. I'm lucky that my niche isn't completely commercial, so there are still plenty of easy, valuable links to build, but I can't imagine how tough it would be to SEO a site in a competitive, commercial niche.