How important are backlinks?

[SimonSez]

High Authority Back Links are King, Content is second, you can write all the good content but if you dont have the backlinks you wont get traffic.

Its very hard to get good backlinks organically.

 

[Black Belt Spodermen]

Your website will rank even without backlinks if you are targetting low competitive keywords but if you are going for more difficult keywords, it won't be possible without good backlinks.

 

[SimonSez]

Your website will rank even without backlinks if you are targetting low competitive keywords but if you are going for more difficult keywords, it won't be possible without good backlinks.

Most of the low competitive keywords are long tail like sentences not single keywords, its super hard to rank for a single keyword now, back in 2010 when I first started my wordpress blog I was on first page and then entered in google news and ranked In The News without any backlinks just good content.

Now All my traffic is gone, my website was likely hurt by the back link thing around 2012 I think it was Penguin, one of the guys on the forums told me that since my website had low backlinks a lot of foreign made for adsense spammers in other countries would STEAL my content or back link to me since they saw me in google news and that ended up hurting my since they pretty much were the majority linkng to me.

So good backlinks is still king more so than ever for ranking for single keywords.