Here’s a video of Matt Cutt, who is a Google developer’s spokesman  He addresses a question I’ve heard many times before. He’s not being totally honest though. In his normal fashion he’s giving an answer to a question in a way that addresses the question, but gives advice that is most beneficial to Google, not the web site owner. Here’s the video, after the jump we’ll have the info he didn’t give and shine a little light on some things to better help website owners instead of Google.

What’s missing from his answer? As usual with Matt, it’s a straightforward answer:

Straight Answer:

Yes links are far more important to your search engine ranking than content.
I’ve seen, and you probably have to, lots of  websites with really poor content rank well on Google and actually sell a lot of product because they gets lots of traffic from the search engines and have a great price. That’s because there are lots of inbound links to the web site.
You could say it’s a popularity contest of sorts with Google. But the only ones who get to vote are people who own web sites. And yes you can pay people to link to a web site (which really just burns Google’s butt . . .)

I’m not saying content isn’t important, because it is. It helps Google determine what you should rank for. When it comes to how high you rank, that is decide 100% by the number inbounds links and where they come from for the most part. Google is getting a little better about delivering relevant results. This means they have to take the content into account more.