gibbergibber - 8:36 am on Jun 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

-- The backlinks concept is academic baloney and only provides a rationalle for penalizing perfectly sound
web pages.--

It's the worst system.... except for all the other systems.

Ideally Google would get a human expert to examine each site in detail, but given the billions of sites out there the only way to do things is through automation.

Machines cannot understand content in any meaningful way, so the only option open to a search engine is to see how many other sites link to that site. The backlinks method is (in theory) a way to indirectly bring in human experts to rank sites.