I believe that in the not too distant future, google will put less and less emphasis on backlinks in determining the ranking of your website, and focus almost exclusively on the quality and content of your website in determining its rankings.
Why? Because the initial purpose of ranking by backlinks was to recognise that good sites would tend to provide links to other good sites. And also that it was the best indication that google had at the time.
The backlinking method has been totally bastardised by a deluge of dodgy backlinking schemes, methods, and tactics. For the last few years, people have been rewarded for building huge networks of backlinks instead of for creating good content.
Wake up and smell the coffee guys.
Google is getting better and better at rating the quality of a site based on the content of that site. It doesn’t NEED backlinks to tell it that a site has good content any more. Just read up on Google and their use of Latent Semantic Indexing
And I think that pretty soon, the quality of your content will be the primary ranking factor. And your gabillion backlinks from all sorts of dodgy article directories and link farm sites won’t be worth much at all.
So if you think that backlinks are all that is necessary to get good search engine results, then I wish you all the best for the future.
regards,
Eric G.


