Matt Cutts says yes.
This week, someone asked whether, in the light of the increasing relevance that Google is placing on content quality, backlinks will lose their importance.
Cutts says that backlinks have many years of viable use left, however the shift of search engine development is focused towards recognizing quality content and conversational search structure so that it can more effectively communicate with users like a “star trek computer”. He does confirm, however, that they will become less important in the coming months than they are right now, or were in the past.
Now, and in the future, more than ever – it is crucial to comb through your backlink profile, remove those links pointing towards your website that really have nothing to do with your industry, and focus on the creation of unique quality content that other reputable websites will love to share, link to, and interact with.
Let us know what you think!
Lets not try to create free backlinks or paid backlinks and try to concentrate more quality content and submit the links to all the social bookmarking websites and automatically people try to link your site.
Want the real truth:
Google is terrified (I know, I’ve been in meetings) about how good SEO has gotten.
There *IS NO OTHER ALGO* other than backlinks. Google has tried dozens of other algorithms which discount backlinks in favor of other factors.
All Google is doing now is penalizing ‘obvious’ SEO backlinks. But this whole malarky about “identifying quality content” is just smoke and mirrors put out by a company which is frankly desperate for content creators to not pursue SEO.