This is an article that i found on the net and that i thought it might help some, hope i'm right Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks. "All I ever hear is numbers numbers numbers. So and So has this many links, we need this many links, how many links can you get us, buy 100’s of links cheap, get your link on 100 pages, ahhhhhhh. The numbers game died a few years ago. There’s another line of thinking out there that you might not know about….. It’s not always "He with the most links" who wins the game……often, "He with the right links" can win the game as well. Really, very often, he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1000 of the wrong links – I see it all the time. I’m sure most of us have looked at search results, and followed it up by checking the backlinks of the top 10 sites….and then scratched our heads and said "Hum….why is that site in the top 10? It only has X amount of links….hum…doesn’t make sense."….I know I used to do that a lot. Upon closer inspection I’ll usually find that the sites with fewer backlinks that rank on the first page of search results have links that are more relevant, or more trusted, or seem to come from the "right places" (trusted industry related sites)...." source: http://www.webuildpages.com/jim/site-backlinks/ now, hope to hear from you about your experience
yeah , you can have a site with 1000+ backlinks that are irellevant and bad and you can have a site with 10 pr5 backlinks that would dominate over it, more backlinks = isnt key for ranking...key is= Value backlinks with PG.
I have found this to be quite true. I usually check to see how many links the number 1 site has but also check the quality of them.