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    Google seems to like building systems that automatically
    scale across all keywords and niches
They haven't been doing a good job lately.

    For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more 
    links to change anything.
Not that many, and do you think that's a problem?

Search "viagra": http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra

This is the third result (after wikipedia + viagra.com which have a hardcoded boost): http://www.genericviagrarx.net/

Here's a sample of links to it: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:genericviagrarx.net

I.e. there are thousands of forums / blogs where you can post your link to (even in a proper context, the more popular the subject the better). Hire a couple of offshore workers for $5 / hour, and in a week you'll have thousands of links pointing to you.




Google's link operator is not reliable - it intentionally hides links to confuse SEOs. Take a site you own, for example, and compare the number of links that webmaster tools shows for it with the number of links that Google's link operator shows for it.

That site you point to has many more links than Google shows. You can check yahoo to get a more realistic count:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.genericvia...

But even that is probably only indexing a small fraction of the links that are likely to be pointing to that site. Generally when a site has a few thousand spammy links, they've usually got tens of thousands more that haven't been indexed.

Now I'm not for a second saying that that site should be ranking where it is, just because it has a lot of links. I really wish Google did a better job of discounting spammy links.




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