There's a link here somewhere

Many people know that inbound links to a site are helpful in developing the page rank of a website which in turn has a positive impact on where the site will appear on a search engine page for a particular keyword.

One of the irritations for people measuring the success of their efforts to build the number of inbound links is that Yahoo! and Google reported the figures quite differently. That has changed and Google's webmaster console now reports backlinks reasonably accurately, once you have identified your ownership of a specific site.

Matt Cutts has clarified on his blog that not all links carry the same weight. That's an interesting post in its own right but the concept that not all links are equally valuable has been "understood" for a while. A link from a highly relevant site with a strong page rank and highly relevant anchor text has to be worth more than a link produced from an automated site whose relevance is more questionable.