This is a debate that seems to never end in the SEO industry, more precisely when it comes to link building. There are two types of link builders with different thoughts:

1. Quality links count more

Quality link are described as those of great value, coming from high PageRank websites, niche-related with less than let’s say 10 outbound links, featuring unique content and so on. These are the high-hanging fruits that are supposed to make a difference and indeed, quality links are most of the times the best ones a website could acquire, even if it lasts lot of time until getting some of those.

2. Quantity of links counts more

These are the usual blog comments, forums links, directories links, guestbook links and so on. The difference between the ones above and these is the fact that these come from high-spammed channels, are located in bad neighborhoods, have maybe thousands of outbound links on page, basically all the opposite to a quality link.

You might say that the answer is simple: quality links count more. But the question that comes is: are quality links easier to be obtained than quantity links? Again, you might say of course, due to the fact that quantity links require much work.
On the other hand, it would not be the first time we see websites ranking quite high in search engine results and when checking their backlinks we notice that only bad links are pointing to their websites, in high numbers. The answers for those sometimes huge numbers are, simple said:

– Scrapebox – a tool for automatic blog comments
– Xrumer – a tool for forum spamming, considered the most powerful blackhat tool ever created
– AutoPligg – a tool for spamming Pligg websites
– Auto-Directory submission tools
– Article Marketing Robot – a tool that submits your articles to thousands of websites thus gaining instant backlink, and so on;

Of course, those are not the single tools that automate link building however they are the most representative ones ever created. Getting back to our initial discussion, it seems that indeed, bad links in quantity can also help in website ranking but only when used with caution and without leaving any footprints. But in the end, one quality link could literally weight as much as 10,000 spam links so the decision on how to approach one of these strategies will only depend to the link builder.