One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is by link-building. All over the world experts spend hours rifling through analytics for likely linking targets, while writers take extra care to add in as many blue words as possible in the hope of a little linklove reciprocation.

It’s often a major aspect of the job for anyone who works online, and can be something of a labour of love.

Of course, there’s no solid, standard way of linking out. If only there was a dedicated expert body who could help out.

Someone like Google maybe?

If a recent patent comes to fruition, it seems the big G may have plans to undo all your hard work in favour of their own know-how.

Google recently received a patent for an ‘Enhanced Document Browser with Auto-generated Linkage’.

That’s right. Automatically generated.

We’re going to assume that this would only be implemented on Google’s own pages or third parties that choose to opt in. The already delicate and unpredictable art we know as SEO would be completely destroyed if this was worked into a browser, as well as raising a massively complicated web property rights argument.

To be fair, how exactly this would be used isn’t covered in any depth, and may just be a case of Google filing because they can. It’s a useful doodah to take some of the grind out of their day-to-day work.

On the other hand, it’s a dynamically generated, personalized link builder that works based on personal user preference, surely the Holy Grail of SEO.

How (and even if) Google decide to use this patent isn’t clear, but it for those of us involved in SEO (that would be every digital marketer in the world then) it means one thing. This is possible.

No more hours of keyword searching, running reports and front loading content, just write and relevant users will find you.

Sounds nice doesn’t it?