Back linking is essential to search engines. These links tell the search engines how many people are looking at your article, site, or that specific URL the link points to. Why is this important? Because the search engines correlate how many people must think that URL is important enough to link to. People caught onto this and started spamming links to their sites where ever they could. The result of this was the dreaded "nofollow" tag for links and a change in algorithm with the search engines. The "nofollow" tag is actually only listened to by the big three search engines, from what I have read - Google, yahoo, and msn/bing. A lot of the smaller search engines do not recognize the "nofollow" tag. But people should realize that all backlinks are important even if the big three do not follow them. So the "nofollow" tag which resulted from all this spam did do some good because almost all people try to satisfy these three titans of search engines. The algorithm change is a little trickier. The algorithm change put a value or importance on what site was back linking to your URL. No matter what there is some value associated with this, unless you are obvious and there is no hiding that these back links are just spam. But the more trusted the site the more importance is placed on the links that it uses. And the more important sites that consider your site and/or article important means that article/site is very important. Remember this portion because it will be a very key aspect of what I mention later. Posting quality articles and blogging is the the way to maintain your brand and good reviews make your image. But it's another challenge to find contractor who will really work.They actually promise every thing do nothing.So I suggest to only pay if you have good exposure or you can pay per post basis. There have some free lancing sites,you can get lots of them.But quality is another concern.Most of them are doing spamming.Your site may get banned.So be careful. Buy sponsored articles to avoid this.Some sites that give opportunities both for quality bloggers for review and giving quality reviews and branding for you.I support them as they have strong system to promote your business. One of the sites is www(dot)postsgenius(dot)com Paid articles is a good source which can give you really quality traffic.