What do back links do for SEO?
 

Hey,

I have a question for some of the more experienced webmasters. If I'm looking for clean, organic traffic from google, what is the benefit of buying backlinks? It seems to me that content and good keyword usage is the most important for google. But are backlinks also crucial? I've worked at getting some backlinks for my site, but I'm also tried my best to "Search engine optimize" it, using Yoast and other methods.

Now I get about 50 google hits a day. I gave up on using backlinks, since I figure it's not really helping me. Am I wrong? Should I work at getting as many links as possible?

Also, does it matter who's linking to me? For example, if some link farm is linking to me, will that penalize me? I've attached an image of my webmaster tools. You'll see that one site alone has over 200,000 links to me. I don't understand how that can happen..

no, you will not be penalized...this is a myth...it's not something that you can control it;backlinks are important also as your unique content;