contentcentric - 12:25 pm on Oct 7, 2008 (gmt 0)

This may be a ridiculous question, but why should Google bother with including a backlinks feature at all if it's basically garbage? Seems like a waste of time and a good way to drive up business for sites that will tell you who's linking to/talking about you, both the ones who make those results available free and supported by advertising and the ones who charge for that data.

It sounds from the discussion like Google's so bent on war with a profession that they're going off track of their mission to provide people with useful information, and there are reasons besides SEO to want to know who's linking to you. That seems nonsensical for a company whose reputation was built on helping people find useful information easier and I just have a hard time buying it.