Backlinks no longer play a big role in search engines... Oops I said it
Yes they don't. If you get a backlink from a site (homepage url) from a high page rank site that website will pass in a lot of link juice (page rank) to your website/blog. Which is really great.
But Google and other search engines are starting to rely more on Authority not page rank. That is why signals such as Domain Authority, Trust Flow and Citation Flow play a big role because they measure authority.
Remember, Google is now favoring authority websites as compared to small niche sites. And it's easy to tell if someone is an authority in a niche, social signals. How many people talk about the brand on social networks is what will determine your rankings from 2015 onwards.
Not just social networks but other authority sites like social bookmarks, forums, discussion boards etc.
Look at it this way, if there's 2 websites with one having a lot of backlinks from
old high PR websites that no one is talking about online. And there's another website that people are always posting and talking about all over the internet.
Which site will Google rank well? Exactly, the one with a lot of activity, if people keep talking about it then it proves it's an authority website. Forget backlinks and focus on real marketing, make sure your social accounts are always active and people are sharing your content on their social accounts, get a lot of engagement.
This way you even build backlinks naturally, by simply relying on social media I've had big magazines use my content and link back to my site. So again, forget backlinks. Hope that helps
