http://www.gameservers.com/ http://leetservers.com/ As you can see, the sites are mostly images and contains little keyword-rich content. They are my competition. I am currently building this website: http://www.esgameservers.com/ I hope to rank well for some of the keywords gameservers.com does. Once my website is complete, do you think I will have enough content to get close to the site mentioned in the SERPS? The keywords involve game servers. Should I focus more on content or getting links? Since my competition doesn't have content and seems to rely on links for their rankings, can I get by on the same strategy?
If you are running mostly image sites, you need to put your keywords in the alt tags. You need content, pages and backlinks - they all help.
What tool did you use to calculate the backlinks? I got around 20,000 for gameservers.com on one checker and only 4,000 on another. Leetservers.com only has 2,465 according to this backlink checker.
go to yahoo and type linkdomain:www.yourdomain. that shows you all the total links coming into all the pages of the domain....including internal links
Actually, when you do link: gameservers.com, it shows 45,000 results because it is showing pages with just the word gameservers in it. Look at this page for instance. http://www.asylum-gameservers.com/ Yahoo says it is linking to gameservers.com, but if you look at the site, it isn't. I will give you an even better example. Go to Yahoo and type link: tekken.info . The site is my own. It has 0 backlinks, but Yahoo says it has 456,000 backlinks! This is because it is searching for links to sites with the word "tekken", not tekken.info specifically. This method works for most sites because domains usually don't contain popular phrases by themselves, but for sites with keyword-only domains it doesn't.