Solomon sg, officially not, or not yet, but IMHO, Google is in the direction of taking into account the data from GoogleAnalytics and GoogleToolbar for tuning actual ranking of each website. By saying ranking, I do not mean only PageRank (actually the PageRank as it is now, is the least issue the Google is interested now) but ranking of a website in the organic search results. This move is vital for any search engine, if one wants to give relevant search results nowadays, since ranking based on backlinks is heavily manipulated nowadays.
quality and quantity of links define your site's ranking therefore for better ranking you should build more links for your website
I dont think so. Backlink is still the key factor for page rank. There are some high ranking websites with hardly any traffic.
Well, If it were based on traffic, then we could all buy a "Get 999,999 hits to your site today" package and laugh all the way to the bank. After looking at my competitor backlinks, I notice that relevance and quality of backlinks rule. Cheers, prophet