Recently I got into a discussion with a good friend of mine who runs one of the most popular backlinks services on the Internet, Empire Market. In this conversation, we discussed whether or not submitting backlinks to Empire Market directories would affect our rankings in the search engines, and whether or not there were other ways to optimize our websites for increased backlinks online, such as through content marketing. We also touched on the recent Google slap, and how that could hurt the economy now more than ever. In this article, we'll talk about whether or not submitting backlinks to Empire Market directories will hurt your website's rankings, and what content marketing is all about.