Have hired 2 "Seo" experts in the past and received conflicting advice. Is it the quality of the link (ie. relevance,PR etc..) or the total number of links back to your site. Thanks in advance.
Quantity never hurts; if you try and get thousands of backlinks you're eventually going to get one good one which will help. But the truth is Quality is much more important. One highly ranked PR5 page with the only external link on it being yours is going to help you INFINITELY more than 5000 backlinks from spammy PR0 directories with hundreds of links on each page.
Quality matters and in particular that which is relevant to the category of your particular website... So if you are have a technology website seek links from fellow technology sites...
Indeed quality matters most. Get some good links, not many but on your keywords and from an important site.
Quality is important but to some degree a quantity of quality backlinks will be needed to rank well in competitive niches. Google says: Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432
If the competition is low then a few quality links will be enough. However in highly competitive niches quantity is required as well.
Looks like the answers to this question are pretty conclusive, and I would agree, link quality is the most important single factor.
Quality backlink is the only key to maintain and improve your PR. You can get those farm link easily but it actually not helping you in PR 1PR5 backlink is better then 100PR1 backlink
It all depends on the search engine based on my experience I think google prefers quality over over quantity while, yahoo will quantity.
First target all the quality links. These will be the most important things. You can get quantity along the way. But work more for getting quality links.
The BL rules are simple: LINK to relative website belongs to same niche / category as yours; and DONT linkback to bad neighbor website (even it is relative to you)
Great Point. I agree with this. Quality as well as Quantity is the main theme in off page SEO. Quantity of Links which has Good quality is matters more.
I think that is likely the best answer. In the eyes of the Google Bot, there is often little difference between a low quality link and a good quality one, though it's not all about the Google Bot. HUMAN traffic is the key in the end and is what one should strive for. 10 links that no human visits may help a bit with SERP, but it certainly will do NOTHING for direct traffic. Where as, a page with lots of traffic itself will likely send some of that traffic to your site. It'll also be better fopr SERP as the page is bound to have a better PR and more links to it, itself. so, IMHO< 100 low quality links equals one good quality link.