I'm not an SEO specialist; just spent some time working with an e-commerce team and did some large-scale scraping so I learned much of this along the way. I'm

I'm not an SEO specialist; just spent some time working with an e-commerce team and did some large-scale scraping so I learned much of this along the way. I'm sure backlinks still matter, but the internal search algos have changed so much since the early days of Google that it's hard to know exactly how much weight each part of the equation has. The main problem with backlinks and keywords is that they are too easy to game so at some point, Google adjusted how they weigh those inputs. The bigger picture is that SEO matters -- a lot. Backlinks are just one part of they equation. But being optimized against Google's search crawler heuristics is a big picture endeavor.