Links are very important without links forget ranking on google or outranking some authority sites which are now in almost every niche, and if you can build good quality links to not great content thats okay too it might still rank, but it will be hard and you will be spending a lot of money. Good content should attract more links, get more shares, its easier to promote and tell people about it.. So from investing money in this 2 (guest posts are the best links you can build or buy) i would choose to build and buy good content. Even if you publish 1 amazing post every 2-3 weeks make it very very good like nobody have for that topic. However with all this google maybe still hit the site and that you have no idea why or whats going on.. I was always frustrated when and if google hit my sites trying to fix things and find out why it happen.. but now i start to not care anymore and just keep adding good content (if the site is blog type) when possible and i look to not go much in minus with investment if the site is not earning profit yet. I say this because i see recently some of my sites that were dead 8-9 months not updated with content or anything at all now recover since 2-3 weeks ago moving up. I didnt have clue why they droped back then in first place as i didnt do anything bad in my opinion.. If you are trying to rank site with few pages, then strategy should be different and focus on links as much as you can PBNs, guest posts, whatever you think is good.
