I’m not expert in SEO business, not eve a newbie. But I’m starting to believe that site content is not important at all in search engine ranking. Earlier I checked the PR of the domain example.com and I turn out that it has PR8. That domain only has 2 line warning or notice. Its back links are totally irrelevant. Only thing it has is lots of back links. Another example would be the keyword “miserable failure†pointing to the president’s page on white house’s website. I submitted one of my site to FFA sites during that period of 4 months my site has PR5, after reading some place that submitting to FFA links pages hurt the search engine ranking I stopped doing that and my PR dropped to 4 and my SERPs results also dropped too. IMO any kind of links relevant or irrelevant will get you results.
For the google algo, the copy on your site may not be the biggest factor. But it is a factor to a certain degree and, indirectly, it is crucial to your rankings. I'll elaborate... It is undisputed that the content on your page affects that page's rankings in the search engine...so, you should take advantage of every opportunity you have available. Yes, a few hundred quality backlinks might give a better boost in the rankings but why not try to achieve both. And the copy affects your rankings indirectly because noone will link to your page if the content is worthless. In addition to this, people will often use the title of the page as anchor text in the link. So, indirectly, the content could be more valuable than you think.