While the advantages, under a Hilltop system, of being linked to by authority or expert pages is obvious, I am less clear on what the advantages might be to a page of being an authority or expert--save, perhaps, that others might more eagerly seek reciprocals, but that would require pretty definite knowledge of who truly is being accounted an authority or expert.

There were several points in that paper that I found of interest. One is that, even back in 1999, they really did no better than Google was doing even then. Another was that several of their factors seemed rather arbitrary, and there was no discussion of how results might vary as those parameters were "tuned". Do we assume that they did that in the early stages and these are about their best results? Or do we assume that this was just a crude demo, and that fine-tuning the several arbitrary parameters might imrove it significantly?

All for all, it looks like it would be no great paradigm shift for SEO purposes: get good backlinks. The results might shift a little (but might not), but all that webmasters can control stays--so far as I can see--largely the same.

__________________
Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
SEO Tools, Toys, and Packages : free tools to directly SEO-augment your sites;
for example, quickly add add over 100,000 relevant white-hat pages to any site.