Generally I have found there are two ways in which web designers approach SEO. There are those who believe that content is king and that your rankings within Google will mostly depend on your on page SEO skills, and there are those designers that believe that backlinks are the key and that little else matters.
I tend to believe that Google rewards the sites with the most relevant and interesting content, but uses backlinks to assist in deciding how valuable a site is, therefore both content and backlinks are essential to rank highly for a competitive search. This is not to say that websites can’t rank highly for a less competitive and obscure search just using content alone.
Although the Google algorithm is extremely clever and has the ability to analyse the content on websites by assessing the spelling, grammar and keyword relevancy, nobody could expect a machine to understand the content and whether the information is correct or not. This is why Google very cleverly uses backlinks to help assist in deciding what information is most important.
The more websites that link through to a particular domain indicates to Google that independent sources are interested in the information provided by that website and therefore that content must be of some value. Google gives greater value to backlinks with a higher Page Rank as this is a good indication of quality. By using Page Rank Google can prevent designers from buying domains just to create backlinks.
Backlink age is important
Backlink age is considerably under estimated by many SEO experts. It make perfect sense that Google will give more weight to backlinks that have been around for a while as this indicates that the article is in fact important and not an attempt to simply buy backlinks to manipulate Google’s system.
Important note: If a backlinks anchor text is changed or removed temporarily, and Google updates the website the backlink is placed, Google will remove any age and in doing so all the authority that backlink has gained over time. My advice, never attempt to ask for a website to change your backlink for SEO reasons, you will do more harm than good!
