Living in the past when SEO was easier

Yup. Most websites.

The links carry more power if you publish them on sites that are not directories.

That means you need to find someone who will let you publish your article on their site because the article content is useful to their visitors or you pay them but they have a site whose main reason for existing is not publishing other people's articles.

And you do not publish dozens of articles on the same site.

Different related websites would do for your guest posting articles and this will give strong signals to Google for considering your websites as good source of information.

Based on the title of the post and the first sentence or two, I think the OP is looking for another blog network or similar autopost program so that SEO is "easy" again.

Sorry to say, although they pop up from time to time, they are usually discovered relatively quickly by Google and you'll just get penalized again.

SEO has never been "easy". Cheating used to be easy but it is harder than ever to get by with a lack of effort these days.

I always found SEO kind of easy but in the last few years I guess I kind of lost my way so to speak. What I mean is for ever we were told by Google to put together great articles and put in just the right key words and follow their rules. The only problem is I find that Google doesn't follow their own rules as I see so many sites in many different areas where the landing page has no text at all only a picture with a box to fill in. I kept thinking how did this site do this since Google always says text is king and how could a text free landing page be on page 1 position 1. Not to mention these sites also don't have keywords in their meta data. I have noticed over the past year or so that many sites no longer put in keywords in meta data. Again something Google kept telling us we needed to do. It makes all the background work on sites more difficult to figure out.

DABK,

Great clarification on the definition of great article vs great content.

Distinctive related sites would accomplish for your visitor posting articles and this will give solid sign to Google for thinking about your sites as great wellspring of data.

My 2 cents...

SEO is something to master in any decade, but once you have mastered it, your skill remains relevant in any decade.

Study and execute your search engine optimization skills regularly and you will see improvement. Don't go looking for easy options that gets you banned anyway. Why go through all the effort of setting up multiple blogs just for rankings in search engines, just to have it all come down eventually and your initial income from ranking in good position gets lost forever.

Master SEO in it's entirety and you'll get more sales and customers in your online business.

Some SEO methods that worked 10 years ago are still applicable today. Depending on your level of skill, some SEO strategies that may have worked in the past, may not work for you, but it's still working for me.

So far there have been many suggestions regarding white hat genuine backlinks. Build Whitehat genuine backlinks they say BUT no one has explained exactly how to do this. Are people suggesting going through yellow pages cold calling and asking for a link on a web site?
It would help if people explained exactly how to do this Step by Step rather than just parroting a common phrase.

We sold such links too from a seven-figure WSO back in the day.

Now it's about getting links from real sites in your industry. Find sites that accept guest posts AND do not label them as such. Create content that fits their readers. Simple stuff, really.

Fair enough. I suppose it depends on your definition of "effective." In my view, a tactic that sometimes, if all the stars align and you guess right and aren't suckered into a scam or the wrong path, works for a few weeks or a few months (and yes, sometimes, even a year or two), but then gets your site (or all your sites) blacklisted in Google is not an "effective" tactic.

I won't argue, though, that some private networks have shown themselves to improve rankings in the short term, and there's even the extremely rare few that have maintained that for longer. But the folks watching Whiteboard Friday tend to be working with mainstream brands and sites that cannot afford to invest in tactics that have a high percentage chance of harming their long-term potential.

Also notable - we've seen PBNs and their ilk be more effective in developing markets vs. developed markets, so if you're considering it, that's probably worth factoring into your calculus. Generally speaking it'll be easier in, for example, Bulgaria than the US to find examples of manipulative links that still seem to work.