Back to the content versus links and ranking issue:
I’ll bet you that on many, many keywords I make more $ sitting on page 6 than any of the folks on page one.
The whole idea is to rank well enough to create enough income to support yourself while working on relative indepencence from the engines.
If you have a site with solid content that provides actual information that interests your visitors, they will bookmark you and come back for info and for picking new places.
I think the engines are catching on slowly too and are starting to watch visitor behavior.
Yes, I will continue to try to make things as easy as possible for the bots, and, yes, I will be in compliance with google rules and requirements as much as possible.
But for me content will always rule, because I strongly believe the quality site will win out in the long run.
I see is as a choice between spending my time trying to keep up with all the twists and turns constantly handed out by algo and other updates and spending my time making players happy.
I’d rather make players happy, while making sure google is still watching.
I don’t see google as the god I am trying to appease, I see google as someone desperately trying to learn how to put my site in first place because searchers will be happy that way. As such I will do things to help google do this, but it’s not my main focus. My main focus is to always be the site that deserves to be number one.