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Ever since search engines were developed there's been a long-waged war between the search engines and the search engine optimizers (SEOs) to get better rankings for their website.

The SEOs are always looking for ways of beating the search engines at their own game, and when they do, the search engines tend to fight back, and usually with a vengeance. The latest Google update (named Jagger) did exactly this, and many high-ranking websites were dropped to the depths of the results.

It's no secret that the search engines place a huge emphasis on the number and quality of links pointing to a particular website in order to establish it's position in the results. For the past couple of years the popular way of increasing this number of links has been through link exchanges programs, or reciprocal linking as it's also known. But now it seems the search engines (in particular, Google) have begun to fight back and devalue these kinds of reciprocal links in what's widely thought to be an effort to eradicate spam and poor quality sites from it's results. So, now that reciprocal linking has had its day, it's time for a new and improved system to take its place.

A new website called ContentRelay (www.contentrelay.com) has currently got the SEO community in a bit of a buzz.

The website enables Webmasters to create links to their website by providing other Webmasters with content to publish on their website. Now this might sound like a strange concept, but there is a sound theory behind it.

The theory goes that if you provide another (similarly-themed) website with content to publish, and include a link to your own website from within the content, then in effect you've created a high-powered, one-way link to your website - which is exactly what the search engines crave. So what's in it for the Webmaster who publish the other persons content? Well, they get more good-quality, unique content for their website - another key ingredient for achieving top search engine rankings. So both parties will gain something from this exchange.

Whether or not this new method of link building will become popular remains to be seen, new concepts always take a while for people to catch on. But there is solid theory behind it, and it is certainly more 'search-engine-friendly' than the earlier method of reciprocal linking, so there's no reason why it shouldn't.