For high competitive keywords it is not enough. You should also have old domain, very good PR and a lot of quality backlinks from your niche websites.
The following website is proof that backlinks still weight pretty heavy: Zombo.com . I think it's brilliant whoever did it, but they naturally obtained a lot of backlinks, and that's it. There is no content and no SEO. They are a PR 6
google is forced changing the rules all the time. If the backlinks were important people were finding ways to get them and certain techniques to get artificial links were used. Now that the content is more important new techniques will be developed...
How Google decide about the quality of information, i dont think they have enough time to decide on that as well as quality manpower. Than how they decide the quality of the content????
At the end of the day.. the only way to future proof your online business and ensure your website will always rank well in Google is by providing the public with user friendly and content packed web site. Period. Do this, and you'll be guaranteed to survive. If your goals are short term.. play with the search engines and play with algorhythms. I feel for you if you spend thousands of hours trying to beat the system with link circles, linking webs, PR drain, etc. only to find that one cold November evening the Google people decide to make a slight change and overnight everything you've worked so hard to build comes crashing down.. forever. Searching for IBM will always get users to IBM's web sites. It's relevant to what they want. As search engines evolve, they will continue to strive to give users more of what they are actually looking for. That's where the real money is... providing users with what they are looking for. Not putting up 10,000 landing pages hoping to capitalize on a few clicks as users click on anything as a way to get away from the useless site they've been tricked into visiting because it had more back links and better SEO than the next guy. Content is king. As technology advances, that's the only thing that's a sure bet!
I've always wondered if they are doing any deep analysis. Maybe monitoring user searches to see what they search for and then how long the spend on the page they click through to before coming back to google to continue the search or try a new link. Search for "red toilet seat covers" and then click the first link, spend 10 seconds, hit back, click the second link, spend 10 seconds, hit back, click the third link, user doesn't return to search results. That would be a good indicatation that the third site has some authority and good content for the search phrase "red toilet seat covers" and if that same pattern repeats itself a lot, shouldn't that 3rd link now become the 1st link? I'm just sayin' -- the technology exists.
I do not see the point. Sure backlinks count for PR. And Yahoo shows 17.000+ backlinks for this page. But for which SERPS is this page ranking? And how does it proof that backlinks weight pretty heavy?
No way is content more important that backlinks, or else.. if your site had new articles all the time with no links then how would Google crawl. New content is for the moment a 'temporary' fix for quick rankings but by all means it isn't the answer to God's prayers.
Links will always be a big factor in Google. The best way (right now?) to see how important a webpage is..