I think that backlinks are far more important than most people think. The best backlinks you can have are to established sites who themselves have a lot of backlinks to established sites.
One of my clients rates at No 1 for a very competitive market. She is a little one woman band. One of the larger companies mentioned to her that this was because she was linked to 3 sites that had been in existence since 2000 or before, one of which is mine. It has 4000+ backlinks and I have a 1 and 2 in Google for my umbrella phrase and a 2 and 3 for a very wanted phrase.
I got most of my backlinks in the early days using free backlink software. I would not write this method off. Google likes old. I watch as Web 2.0 pages come and go in weeks. My backlink sites are still there and so am I in the rankings. It was also very fast for my client to get to No 1 - not 6 months but weeks.
1 good backlink is worth 10 articles - you should be doing them both.
Just a personal view from someone who knows it works.
