This week saw the surprise $1bn acquisition of hipsterlicious photo-sharing app Instagram by Facebook, making overnight multimillionaires of its 13 employees. Facebook is no stranger to picking up small businesses here and there, largely for talent acquisition, but this is clearly bigger than hoovering up a few more skilled coders.

Since its inception, the key to the algorithm which powers the world's most powerful search engine has always been links. The number, quality and type of links that point to a website impact where it ranks for certain search terms and ever since the inception of the search engine itself, it has been an attribute which has been manipulated by search experts the world over.