Stephan Marais
Social linking has been one of the most significant and realistic indicators of how credible, useful and/or authoritative a content is these past few years, helping search engines identify high quality pages over the web, and to the extent of somehow improving their search results.
Google's number one priority is being able to differentiate between natural sites and spam- centered sites. It's a fine line to walk, but in order to offer the highest quality information for users; search engines need clues. As many Webmasters know, linking is the number one clue and always found at the center of this dilemma for Google and other search engines.
