Originally Posted by CyberSEO

In the after-Panda world? YES, they are extremely important. You must know the main Google slogan. It says: make sites for the real people.

So now Google is ranking your site depending on the user activity. It watches for the surfers via its spying tools (Chrome, Google Toolbar, Google Analytics etc) and estimates their experience (bounce rate, average time on site, % of bookmarkers and many other parameters).

Thus if you site looks cheap and contains only boring articles which was written by "SEO gurus", any real visitor will close it even before it will be fully loaded into the browser. You can buy 1000's links, but such site will never be rated well by Google.

On the other hand, if your site has a breathtaking design and is filled with tons of eye-catching content such as videos and images, you visitors will browse it, add to their bookmarks, give it likes in various social networks etc. And it doesn't matter if your content is really unique or not (even Google by itself has 0% of unique content), it will attract the real surfers and be sure that Google will be notified about that.