Google’s Maile Ohye concluded Link Week with a tutorial on inbound links. It says basically what SEO experts have been saying for years: content and inbound links are most important, and in that order.

Just because it’s old news doesn’t mean it’s bad news. Google’s had a real history of silence on the SEO side of things, and experts were often left to theorize and test—and worse, try to game. Google sent a pretty loud signal this time last year by hitting the PageRanks of paid directories, a move seeming to confirm basic white-hat SEO tactics.

In her post, Ohye extols the virtues of naturally gained, editorial inbound links and directly denounces links appear “spammy,” or not “merit-based.”

“One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

"Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

Ohye then offered four bullet points on how to earn merit-based links, paraphrased below:

• Start a site-related blog, writing or video, research or entertainment.
•  Be interesting. Be a teacher. (Hey, that should be a recruitment slogan for a College of Education somewhere! I’ll sell it to ya for the bargain price of $500,000—if a private school, just $10,000, since as a non-government institution you can’t just print the money you need.)
• Participate in the community surrounding your industry—social media, blog comments, user reviews.
• Provide useful products or services.

In short: content, content, content, a little participation, and the links will come.