The battle between Google and those trying to artificially manipulate its search results is an ongoing battle. Google on March 19th took down one of those blog/link networks named BuildMyRank.com. BuildMyRank.com confirmed Google has deindexed an “overwhelming majority” of their network as of March 19, 2012. The management of BuildMyRank.com has decided to immediately shut down their service and provide refunds to customers.
Since the Panda update, Google has pretty much take the wind out of the sales of most Article Marketing websites, Article syndication and blog networks. This pretty much means that creating your own content that people will share is the only way to get good authoritative links.
I hate the term Viral content anyway. What you are doing is just creating great content that is easily shared.
Imagine having content that users of Wikipedia would link to? What about video tutorials that forum members would share?
We have created a few good pages that have some links from forums, like our post on Time To First Byte. We carried out research, and wrote a post that was valuable to us.