I wonder how successful SEOs actually are in reverse-engineering Google. These pretty graphs look scientific, but they are based on an aggregation of opinions.

I wonder how successful SEOs actually are in reverse-engineering Google. These pretty graphs look scientific, but they are based on an aggregation of opinions. Also the current state with the "linkerati" having disproportionate influence on ranking is natural (there have always been people with bigger influence on what others think) but they are arguably less objective than the end users, so diminishing their influence might improve search results. One way for Google to do it would be to evaluate the topic of the page / site that links to you, and make the link count for more if the source and the target page / site are consistently about the same topic.