Steve

Great point Tom and the truth is that there is a lot that will be the same in the future - I can't see backlinks going anywhere soon so all the talk of G+ and user intent is nice but I don't think it'll be core any time soon.

My own thoughts are that Google will just continue to push forward in their ability to understand which links are truly "earned" and which are "built" and that this will continue to drive how people try to obtain them.

Another reason why creating engaging titles is important although that's nothing new. It does beg the question whether this would be open to abuse by spammers? Can Google tell how "real" a user is? Do you think the authority of the site played a part (i.e. Moz is expected to get lots of traffic whereas a brand new domain would not)?

What about if Google don't use the social signals directly in their algorithm but use them as a factor in deciding the weight to give to links pointing to a page/post? By this I mean that a page with say 100 backlinks from different domains would be expected to have many times more social shares than this wouldn't it? And if those social shares were not present then could Google look more suspiciously at those links and/or downweight them?

Again this wouldn't be hard to game if it were the case but I always try to look at SEO as holistic with the 200+ factors all interacting in one way or another and social and links go in tandem as the article points out.