How are backlinks calculated?

[Mattinblack]

I asked my Guru this question - his response (from a $100K-£65K job in SEO) was in short 'Fuck Knows'. His opinion is that Google are still playing with it and until they stop tinkering for a while nobody can figure it out. Google has such a large amount of data that any general update they do takes *weeks* to trickle through all the sites on their servers and when they are 'tinkering' frequently they can re-update a part of the data before the original update has finished running on all their machines. A week or so ago I had two sites links dissapear entirely for 48 hours, re-appear cut in half and then change again to maybe 75% of their former strength. Thank God for MSN and Yahoo.

Google may be popular with surfers but it is fast becoming unpopular with site owners. I personally am seriously considering forgetting about google entirely and not even submitting. It seems to take up more and more of my time every week.