yes, the backlinks count The heading is not to say that decreasing back links are beneficial directly, even though they are, in a way. I use Yahoo.com to check my back links. I am observing my backlink count going down at a steady pace since last one year. Some, one year back, I had a count of 2600 odd back links as shown by Yahoo Site Explorer. And I have used freetrafficsystem.com madly, although randomly, nonetheless very highly and it has really done its job fantastically. This, is in addition to my article marketing, reciprocal LEs and all the normal link building exercises that we all know of. Now, as of today, according to Yahoo site explorer, the links pointing to my site are 1496. That's a reduction of over a 1000 link counts. I am aware that: links haven't been removed, at least to this tune Yahoo hasn't bungled up with math, no way Free traffic system isn't mixing up things Still, my site has really come up on SERPs in the year. Can you guess, the reduction has really helped me? I am beginning to believe that the mindless backlink spamming is useless and if at all it were, the SEs would count them and credit them instead of filtering them out. If this is true, there is a lesson to be learned. Focus on building quality links, not the kind which eventually get filtered out. Many times we are obsessed with the numbers, not their quality and fail to see how they are going to at least compensate for our efforts and time spent at building them let alone making a contribution to search engine rankings. What do you think about this?