I have a site, I won't say what topic, but it gets over 1 million searches a month, I am the first link on the second page, and out of all of them I am pretty sure I have the most backlinks. The only problem with my site is that it is a .info. Does google take TLD in search engine ranking into consideration?
Extension does not matter. Google does not care if its .com. org, .edu, .gov. What matters is how relevant the site is to your search query. One of my sites is a .us, and it ranks very well in a search for its topic.