Pure white hat SEO, in the way Google wants to see, is no backlink building at all. Google recommends working only on your on-site SEO and making content. Creating sites for SEO purposes is most likely limited to creating facebook pages or a few web 2.0s so that word about it spreads out in a "natural" way. Google prefers if linking to your site was done naturally and by people who truly found your website to be helpful and linked to it by their own volition.
All those sayings like "Content is king" or "Quality over quantity" is totally true but you can't just leave it at that. There is a whole lot more context to those sayings and it is totally worth your time to find out what that is. Dumbing down the SEO process to a few easy to remember phrases does the opposite of educating people, it oversimplifies it to the point of being wrong or misunderstood.
Building several garbage links is definitely not as good as a few good quality ones and is more likely to be penalized as Google tweaks their formula and algorithms which they are constantly doing. Natural link building is much less aggressive but it's what Google prefers.
It isn't noticed by many of us but what we are really doing is following the terms and standards of what counts as "useful" to one of the biggest monopolies ever created.
We're making them richer and more powerful is what I'm saying since a lot of us market our services to please Google. So I would say the best way to do SEO would be to give Google what it wants while still sneaking around the flaws in their system. Find the flaws that won't likely be changed or aren't too widespread to be saturated and used so often it catches Google's attention and they even begin addressing it publicly. I'm looking at you SAPE. I'm not questioning the effectiveness of SAPE though, I'm just saying it's gotten very popular. SAPE totally brings improvement. You just have to be careful and take the time to learn how to use it. That applies to a lot of things.
Obviously for several marketers and niches, waiting for links to be built by everybody else is simply not an option for obvious reasons. That is why there are so many different approaches to SEO. But here's the thing: No matter how Google wants to have things their way, they cannot won't normally just go out and penalize sites with thousands to hundreds of thousands of links. They are using a complex formula to determine what passes their standards. But this formula is just what it is: a formula. Penguin and Panda were big tweaks that made a lot of previous SEO techniques worthless. Google gave their reasons for why the made those changes and lots of us took that info and tested out a lot of new things to see what could work now. I say you have to pay attention to Google and deduce what they will be doing next.
At the end of it all, no matter what Google says or does with their algorithms and formulas, what really has the most weight in determining rank is, I believe, is still the amount of quality backlinks. As Scritty once said, 9/10 the site with the most backlinks wins over its competition. Find out what backlinks your competition are using, use them yourself whenever you can (they must work since they rank above you), add more to it, and do whatever else you think will help.
If there is any mistake with any of my points I would be happy to be corrected by anybody more experienced. If I'm wrong or mistaken somewhere then that means I can improve. So I beseech those with more experience and practical knowledge to point out my mistakes. I would appreciate it greatly.
Jackmitch
