But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to other sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given page was? This helps individual sites, but says l

But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to other sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given page was? This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.