Link building and social media optimization aren't necessarily spam activities (but I can see why you might correlate the two; there are a lot of shady link bui

Link building and social media optimization aren't necessarily spam activities (but I can see why you might correlate the two; there are a lot of shady link building operators out there and a lot of social media charlatans, for lack of a better word.) While there are a lot of technical pieces to SEO (that go beyond mod_rewrite hackery, as you put it), most legitimate SEOs spend as much time on the marketing side of the equation. There are a few legitimate link building "tricks" out there, but most SEOs doing a good job at link building & social activities are focused on creating worthy content that ranks well in search and gets attention on social media sites. BTW, nofollowing links to "sculpt" the way PageRank flows through your site doesn't work anymore - nofollow now "evaporates" the PageRank rather than forcing more of it through the other links on your page :)