Domain Backlinsks

No matter how high the number is? So something like 17k but with poor quality, beatable?

Easily, for me.

Especially other affiliate marketers' sites. Long experience has taught me that the owners of such sites have typically taken a quantitative approach to off-page SEO, typically being interested in "numbers of backlinks" and "page ranks" rather than in the relevance of the sites (not the pages!) on which the backlinks appear. I know that such sites are usually very easy to outrank with far lower numbers of the types of backlinks I get from my article syndication. I do very little off-page SEO but I'm gradually acquiring highly relevant backlinks from sites with substantial vocabulary overlap (i.e. commonality of keywords) with my own and easily outranking sites with thousands of "directory backlinks", "forum profile backlinks", "blog network backlinks" and generally all the sort of backlinks one sees being bought and sold online.

No, one doesn't. But with just a little bit of judgment and experience, one actually develops a knack - without doing all that! - of telling whether a site's owned by someone whose approach to off-page SEO has been a "quantitative" or a "qualitative" one. This is all it really boils down to.

I don't pretend that this "method of judging" is 100% reliable, of course, but it's been extremely useful to me, over the years, and the more Google amends its algorithms to reward quality at the expense of quantity (which it does very regularly and says it will continue to do so), the more useful it gets.

It depends how much time you're taking with this. I tend to do it once only and quite quickly, when I'm starting off a new niche and want to draw up a list of "possible keywords" for it.

I don't disagree with you, overall, because ultimately all "keyword research" can bring you is search engine traffic, which, for me, is the worst and least-converting kind of traffic I can ever get for any of my niche sites anyway. I'd rather have it than not have it. I can't put it much more strongly than that, though.

Yes, such observations are very common and perfectly valid.

Relevance of the vocabulary/keywords of the site on which the backlink appears to the page linked to; yes.

This is a big part of the reason why a backlink from an Ezine Articles article to your own site is worthless. The page in EZA on which the backlink appears will be on exactly the same subject as your website, of course, but EZA itself, overall, isn't.

I regularly see pages listed with 100 or so top-quality, top-relevance backlinks which I know I can't so easily beat, but other pages listed with tens of thousands of backlinks which I know will be no problem at all for me.

It's possible that they might have 100 brilliant backlinks "in there" among their tens of thousands of backlinks, and I'll never notice that, but it's actually very unlikely, because people who've taken a quantitative approach are usually people who genuinely don't understand how linkjuice is determined at all, and they need hold no threat/fear for you. Normally!

My rule of thumb is that if a site has what I strongly suspect to be "bought links", I'll beat it effortlessly just by getting my articles syndicated. Again, it's not 100% reliable, but it's done very well for me.

I think Google generally works it out "mechanically", by measurable and objective parameters, but maybe not exclusively so. I suspect nobody can answer this question with certainty. "You learn to tell". If you have an "arthritis site" and your competitor has backlinks from the Mayo Clinic and WebMD and rheumatology departments of teaching hospitals, you're probably in trouble. If it has thousands of backlinks from article directories, url directories and forum profile backlinks, you just assume they won't trouble you at all, and you'll usually be right. :confused:

This. Exactly.

Good question. You have two levels on which you determine "quality". For the HUMAN user, it's all about information, knowledge, entertainment - whatever. Real value. For the BOT user (a web spider, for example) - i.e. a program which collects your content and then passes it on to the master program which evaluates it - it's a checklist of factors which form part of its algorithm.

Knowing what those factors are is the HEART of SEO. SEO is in effect an effort to back-engineer a Search Engine's algorithm, in an effort to "please" it enough for it to rank our content higher than others.

Over time and with experience, as well as through official policy announcements by the likes of Google, people have figured out what "quality" means. And as time goes by and revisions pile up - it's a more and more complex thing.

But some things are obvious. Quality, to a bot, means "relevance" and "authority" - in broadest of strokes.

Now, the tricky part is HOW does the program figure out either of those? Well, "relevance", for example, is assessed, among others, by an analysis of words on the page, while "authority" is established by looking at which other sites refer to your page as well as which sites your page refers to.

This is VERY over-simplified, but it does give you the basic idea. I learned the most about this from an obscure WSO called SEOlater right here on WF. But there's SO MUCH written about all this. The more you study it, the more it will fall into place.

Even I would suggest to do your own SEO. But then, a little bit of help from a competitor research can sometimes help you rank well in Google. It's good to have a look at your competitor's backlinks to get an idea what type of linking he is doing.