This is what SEO has started to be. LINK WAR! I mean for the most competitive keywords, you will need thousands and thousands of websites linking to yours to get near that top 10, where the real money is.
Agreed, Google's algo if far too link/anchor orientated if you ask me. Personally i don't feel a great algorithm is one that lets a crappy page rank #1 just because of link weight alone which is what happens now. All having a brilliant page does is encourage links to build naturally, document scoring really needs to be offset to other factors a bit more to reduce the link bias. But hey, doesn't worry me that you can artificially inflate rankings like this.
Time to get away from the search engines, folks. I wonder if you can use smoke signals to promote a website?
You'd be buggered in Chicago with that one! One of my competitors has a crap site, with around 500 words stuffed at the bottom of the site in the footer, the usual kind of keyword stuffing, 'product x, products x, x product, product x cheap, discount product x', etc. Yet the site has around 2000 backlinks and ranks above my site. Why? Because for every range of product that company sell, they've made a site for it, and ALL their sites pass PR to each other. How do I know this? The only backlinks they have showing in Google and Yahoo are from their own domains. I submitted a spam report to Google. What did they do? Sweet F.A.
How long before some big change comes around the corner and a new measure takes over the backlinks a site has. What if google were to introduce a rating system where your site had to be rated by a certain number of real people before making the top page? OK that idea might not be implementable but something new is bound to come along else things will just get out of hand and search engine placement will mean nothing!
i think google would chnage its ranking system... it wouldn't just stick to one thing, also to catch out people spamming and cheating. pigeons? what? are they going to fly down onto your shoulder and tell you to go a website!