Howdy Farris,

I believe you should concentrate on a few GOOD backlinks to begin with.

Links that have the potential to increase your trust score, Moz DA/PA and aHrefs DDR as search engines will rank you higher in the SERPS.

That said, the higher your scores, the greater the chance of other reputable sites wanting to link in, thereby hopefully sharing some additional link juice.

Once you have gotten your metrics in a healthy state, I think working on your content is next, which should be seen by search engines as worthy material given your higher standing regarding metrics.

On a slightly different note, I tend to cringe when I read someone saying "you MUST have unique content on your site". I certainly believe that your site is going to generate some unique content because its unique in itself but for people to believe a site needs to generate different content from the 16 Billion Plus web pages already out there, well I think thats a pipe dream and that there will be considerable overlap.

Even Google search has NO unique content to offer, it only serves up everyone else's stuff and I am confident they know it, just as I am confident they make allowances for what might be called "duplicate content" on the part of others.

Well thats my take anyway ... cheers.

I know that both are important. But the content is in your hands whereas backlinks need to be approved by the webmaster of the website. But both are important.

And regarding the duplicated content, I think you are right. How the hell would Google know if your content is 100% unique. It makes sense. But then again, Google uses super computer to index, read and understand the web. Think of Google as a machine learning company that tries to understand the web. It's that simple.