After Google penguin update. Strong Social Presence is more important than backlinks. Likes and Shares in Facebook, Tweets, Retweets and Favorite Tweets also Google Pluses and Google Plus Shares all these are social signals to search engines now. Social signals are playing most important role in search engine ranking factor.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Social signals are important and you can get a short term boost from a massive retweet wave for example but ranking in a big niche with just likes and +1s isn't going to happen soon. However they are becoming more and more important with every update.
Please explain why and also share the result of the tests that bring you to this conclusion.... Or you just read it somewhere? If you are so confident about this to come here and post it the let's make a bet. Let's take 2 website with 2 new domains and let's try to rank for the same kw.... you will use only social signal and I will use backlinks... let's see how can rank higher after 6 month....
That's a genuine bet there.. Backlinking is important even how many updates Google implements in near future... It always depends on how you deal with the link building process!!If you gonna spam your money site with thousands of blog comments and etc.. I'm sorry you're out of the league!!
The discussion here is not about how you build your backlinks, the point is... from the op point of view.. that social signals are better then backlinks.... Thing that I is not true. About building backlinks using spam technique I can not understand your point there are useless because they do not work or because they are unethical?
I just mentioned what backlinks that works for Penguin... Spammy backlinks will get the site sand boxed for sure!!
Ok, let's male a difference here. Spammy backlinks or better said backlinks that does not look natural can bring you in sand box (this is not the end of the world but this is another discuttion)... But if you create backlinks using automated sotware to create like 100.000 of backlinks per wekk/month/day .. etc this does not mean you will get in the sand box this of course if you know how to do it and this is for sure.... Since I do not like people that talk about things they just read I must come and say that this is something that I test it... and you can rank and keep the top position with an website just using (about 89% of the links) blog comments created with SB.... and is true that some time I loose some position but every time it came up fast and higher... More than that this website was the only one on witch the penguin update heaved an positive effect and the website get from page 2 to page 1. Now I saw a littel drop back on page 2 but I think is because of the PR update because I saw it starting to rise again. So if you know what are you doing it can be done... also true is the fact that if I blast a website with 100K backlinks in one day ping all of them and then stop that website will go to sand box and it will be difficult to get up again, not impossible but difficult.
Building links from all types of sources is key to higher rankings. Social signals are important after google update