I apologise if someone has already spoken about this as I haven't had time to keep up with all the latest in the last few months. I had been marketing a site a few months ago which had done pretty well in Google for a certain term. I spent approximately 2 weeks marketing the site in which time it steadily climbed in rank. I stopped about 6 weeks ago and it reached a peek of position 9 for a certain keyword and it has started to steadily drop back down again. Does Google take into account the number of sites which are continuously linking to a site to determine how popular a site is as well?
I feel as though it is factored in to some degree but that is just through my personal experience. The best example I can think of is Movie sites. The ones I have followed accumulate links at a fast but steadily increasing pace and their ranking rise quickly. After the movie is out of theaters they usually lose some of the links from the studios site but overall keep a good portion. What does happen though is that there are relatively few new links. Usually I witness their ranking begin to slide despite their Marketleap score staying around the same. Don't know if that helps or not. Its certainly an interesting subject and I hope there are some more posts
That changes my answer all together. After reading the Google Patent Application 0050071741 I am under the impression that "yes" the rate of new links being added is taken into account.
For my own use I've copied the contents into a word file and summarized each point. Some time soon I will go over it again and draw up an overview. Like everyone else.