joost - 8:40 am on May 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

I get the feeling that I will be very old, very grey, incontinent and dribble a lot before it actually comes to pass.

I certainly hope not ;-)

My strategy is NOT “or low volume high quality links or high volume low quality links”, but (if need be) “and low volume high quality links and high volume low quality links”, with the high quality links as an assurance for future ranking. You forgot to quote the second part of that sentence:

It is a lot easier for you to collect some additional low-quality links to rank now, then it will be for your competitors to gain quality links once the algo gets better.

In other words: if your competitors outrank you through mass directory, rss, article, and social bookmarking submissions, blog comments, profile links, link wheels, or whatever mass link strategy popular at that particular time, go ahead and do that also, but just don’t forget your quality links.

With:

It is a lot easier for you to collect some additional low-quality links to rank now

I meant there are hundreds of cheap services you can outsource this type of link building to, and dozens of cheap software solutions.

Quality links are always a winning strategy, but everything is relative: in some fields you can outrank your competitors with quality links only, in others, more competitive ones, you just can’t. This also depends of the quality of your site: does is deserve to have the sufficient amount of quality links to outrank your competitors? If this is not so, it will never rank in very competitive fields if you don’t play the game just like your competitors do.

In competitive fields there’s a permanent race where certain webmasters keep inventing strategies to manipulate the search engines, and the SE ‘s eventually catch up and devaluate that strategy.

If you ONLY play it just like them (and forget to build your quality links) your ranking will tank just like theirs once the search engines catch up.

And then, of course, there are the other ranking factors, such as domain name (very often underestimated), on-page seo, the search engine’s preference for “brand”-sites, etcetera.