Ideally you rate the person by his work. (Magnus is a great chess player because we wins games) If we cant rate someones work we can use opinions from those note worthy in their field.
But when those people got their respectable reputation by the same means you could have an entirely circular self-praising reputation machine that seems to work wonderfully but operates without reviewing any work.
At some stage of google the Nr 1 result for both "France" and "Paris" belonged to a blogger from NYC who had a single highly optimized page about France and one about Paris.
Similarly a high page rank page about cars shouldn't be an authority on anything else but if they link to your article about flowers it gains a lot of points. So much it would be attractive to pay them for it.
Back links were fabulous when the internet started then increasingly became a self serving loop.
But when those people got their respectable reputation by the same means you could have an entirely circular self-praising reputation machine that seems to work wonderfully but operates without reviewing any work.
At some stage of google the Nr 1 result for both "France" and "Paris" belonged to a blogger from NYC who had a single highly optimized page about France and one about Paris.
Similarly a high page rank page about cars shouldn't be an authority on anything else but if they link to your article about flowers it gains a lot of points. So much it would be attractive to pay them for it.
Back links were fabulous when the internet started then increasingly became a self serving loop.