Links are probably still the toughest thing to manipulate over all. Although for some people it's easy, finding any sort of quality links at all is tough. When Google raised the threshold for how they counted links, they ended up with search results with many .edu type sites as experts and most of the times those really aren't the best results. I don't think they've given up on the strategy either. It must have been convenient for them to roll it back or they wouldn't have. They are probably worried about impending competition.
I think it just took them too long to implement whatever they were going to implement and it was tuff to get more time with public screaming in the ear so they decided to roll back the old results. Unfortunately it doesn't necessarily mean that they wont implement new filters later on :(
I would be willing to bet they will have more and more filters. And I'm willing to bet it's related to CPC.
Although mostly accurate, this is sort of a creepy view of an SEO. Pretty much what skill level does getting links require? You either sit around all day and ask for links or you manufacture them from your own network of sites. I mean we know this is pretty much what happens. An SEO gets a client, and then what he does he is changes the footer text on all of his domains to point at the client's page. Voila! SEO work is pretty much done. Where is the Art in that?
There's no art in it. But there is money in it.
google will use localrank at some point and the ill-gotten gains from off topic linking will stop.
Probably true edwin. On-topic links are best in that regard, as well as getting targeted visitors.
On-topic links are always the best and they will become more and more important down the road. The easiest way to boost relevancy in the search engines is to boost the relevancy of the page. Make it the best page you can find and it will be found.