The cat is out of the bag: The search algorithms place a fairly high degree of emphasis on the number of incoming links when determining a site's authority in the rankings. As a result, every SEO guru and would-be superstar blogger has started spamming the living daylights out of the rest of the web trying to build backlinks to their own sites. In itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing; in theory, it forces people to stop being so myopic.