I think this is wishful thinking. Google have been trying to make search smarter for many many years. The truth is that links are still a good signal, and you should try to consciously build links. There are many many many articles out in the internet that are well-written and informative but noone can find them because they're not in the top 10 in Google.

Creating good content and promoting it through PR should result in natural links - the exact type that Google looks for.

If you try to stay on top of the latest SEO tactics, you end up hurting yourself in the long-term. For example, awhile back it was recommended to create huge directories of conten t (something like: Travel deals in Ohio, Travel deals in NY, etc, etc). With Panda update, you are now penalized if you have too much similar content. Why deal with all that headache, just create good content.

Yep, that's what I said. Creating good content ALONE is not enough and never will be. The internet, like life is not a meritocracy. Just because you write great content doesn't mean Google will do you a favor and feature it. You need to promote it, which is what linkbuilding post-Panda is all about. Not blog commenting, forum spamming, or submitting to directories.

But telling someone to "just write good content" is like telling a programmer "just create a good product". The world doesn't work like that. You need to hustle, shout and say Look at how awesome this site/app/article is! Link to me! I don't like it that much, but that's how the game is, and if you don't play it accordingly, you'll end up with awesome content and no visitors.

True, I take it for granted that everyone knows marketing is the most important thing you need to know, no matter what product or service you provide.

Why do people believe links are still a good signal? It is a textbook case of distorting a metric by relying on it.

Traffic to (and engagement on) a site seems to be a much better signal, for the many sites that use Google Analytics, at least. But not everyone uses GA though...

Backpedalling now, PageRank is about weighted links. Link farms should have no weight to give, and links from the user generated parts of pages (which are easy to detect on most blog platforms) should be easy enough to weight fairly too. So it is hard to see why Googlebot gets fooled by any blackhat link techniques that Google humans are aware of, except maybe the case of selling links (influence peddling), but one can argue that is a social /legal issue, not a technical problem.

Out of all the signals, links are still one of the best. What else are you going to rely on?

Good content is a key part of SEO