Originally Posted by Vick!

Well, its has always been a combination of different factors .. their weight just kept changing over the time. Every one knows search engines keep tweaking their shit from the day one.

But yeah, once factor that can dominate all others are backlinks, you can get an empty single page site ranked for literally any term if whole fucking world start linking to you (examples are ranking of adobe page, google.com and yahoo.com for totally unrelated terms "click here", "exit" etc..) . Of course its not easily possible in reality, but in case it happen .. nothing can prevent you from ranking, so what I mean is .. backlinks alone have power to dominate every other factor .. may be out-weight is better word for this? not sure.

The guy who is saying content is major factor, is also right ... but how? If you have some quality content (well informative article, useful tool, a big news, astonishing video etc) .. you will get ranked, because people love linking to such things from forums, their blogs and stuff ... so, backlinks are what getting you ranked again, but indirectly.