Contrary to what most of the down-and-dirty, front-line linkbuilders thing, this is actually a good thing. Yes, it’s annoying insofar as you can’t just sit down and slap together a dozen lines of code that will automatically scrape a database of website directories and post your site to all twelve thousand of them — but let’s look at what that was actually doing to SEO.

When you have a metric ton(ne) of backlinks each of which have almost zero value but which combine to be worth maybe a dozen “real” content-heavy, quality backlinks, you don’t actually change the SEO game in a meaningful fashion. All you do, really, is create a “you must be this rich” line — entrepreneurs who can’t afford to get the metric ton(ne) created in the first place simply can’t meaningfully compete with those who can, because they’re always going to be that dozen “real” backlinks behind their competitors who did pay for the ton(ne) and also for the real backlinks.

Now, there’s always going to be a degree of “rich man wins” in SEO, but that kind of arbitrary cutoff was actually just a stranglehold on competition in the market. With Panda and Penguin forcing everyone to play more-or-less the same link building game (make high-quality, rich backlinks and fill your pages with high-quality, rich content), the SEO game may be a little more difficult for companies that specialized in the less-kosher kinds of linkbuilding, but it’s distinctly better for everyone else.