I understand perfectly. It is you that have no idea what you are talking about. I go back to your first claim above
This is patently wrong and you will find no one here who is going to agree with you.
I totally disagreed with you, it can’t be ranked well without good backlinks.
It’s depends on competition, If you have a domain which contain your name or your company name NOW it can be rank without backlink because of low competition but if you search about your service or product, you will see that there is lots of competition and your website is not yet listed in top 100 
There is over 550 rules Google apply to each pages to determine their ranking. You can’t get ranked by follow one of them
I agree with Clarkjackson. A domain name that includes your main keywords is helpful but it doesn’t guarantee a number one per se. It is just one more point in the complex algorithm that search engines use to calculate rank (with special attention to Google, of course).
Also, a domain name is part of your brand so you not only need to think of keywords but about how your company will be seen and how you want to be represented. So choosing keywords for a domain name may not be the wisest option, even if they do help in your SEO efforts. But this would be another debate 
Yes, that’s obviously right. In fact, nothing can ever guarantee a number one slot. If that was not so, we’d all be doing it, and that top slot would be extremely crowded.
Or, in the words of W.S. Gilbert: When everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody.
Mike
It makes sense to start publishing articles and producing content if this content facilitates the visitors of the website. Writing articles and publish them in any section of your own website (news, blogs, etc.) with the solely purpose to improve SE ranking is a waste of time.
Hi Mike. If that’s true then what do you think they are putting more ‘weight’ on now?
And how will people find your content without links or rankings?
Search engines will rank a site quite high if it has a lot of well structured, information rich unique content that gets frequent additions. How high, depends on the competition as well as the quality of the content. One of my pages ranks first for keyword + london @ 200,000 returns, but goes down to 15th for keyword witout location @ 800,000. This is simlar for other keywords where I rank 1st for keyword + SOUTH London and significantly lower for keyword + London. Admittedly, I have structured my seo as much as I can to eliminate showing up in searches for north London, but I guess it would have happened anyway if I had not done that.
I guess that in the same way they found me 
With my first site I didn’t even fill the form to be indexed by Google and didn’t tell anyone that the site existed… still, a few weeks later, Google found me! 
How? I don’t know. The only thing that I can think of is that Google checks the list of active domains from time to time… but it just a thought and I don’t have a clue if Google would worry about that at all. There may other logical explanations that I didn’t think of, of course Yet, not even my family knew that I had that site. It was an experiment and not a site that I was going to promote.
Good content is important if you want other people to naturally backlink to you… once you’re found
Do you know the rules or any of them?
Google are a domain registrar but they don’t sell domains names. I’ve always thought that they did it for access to the ICANN database so yes, they check new domains periodically.
However, that doesn’t answer my question of how people will find your content. Either you’ll rank badly because it’s a competitive keyword phrase and you have no decent backlinks, or you’ll rank highly for a non-competitive keyword phrase that no-one is searching for.
Either way, with no good backlinks, you get very little traffic.
At the very beginning, that can be via blogs, forums, conventional advertising and many other ways, as well as people that look for something specific, and go past the top.
That is not necessarily true. You can just hit the nail squarely on the head with good content ( I’ve done that twice ) and go straight to page one purely on content alone. The second option to rank well is to have a lot of sub pages with high quality long tail content, which each in turn will help a little to jack up the ranking of the site as a whole. Once you are there, you can add content for more highly competed keywords, which will rank at a postition where they still get found even if not at the top. As long as the content is really good, Google will rank it reasonably well, AND the people that find it are likely to create real links that then improve ranking further.
but then… you answered yourself, don’t you think?
I agree with you that with no good backlinks, you get very little traffic… that means that someone found you (like my case, where I was indexed and traffic came out of nowhere even when I didn’t do anything to get it). Now, if you have good content, a minimum percentage of those persons may backlink to you in their own sites (or tweets, or whatever) and little by little your site will grow… if you keep on adding content and that content is great.
Having said that, the process is long enough to make you wish to go a bit faster… which we all do by calling our friends and telling them about our fantastic site, using PPC ads, offline promotion techniques, etc. The better the content, the more possibilities we have to get a natural backlinks.
And, of course, if you have other sites… you are going to backlink yourself. It may not have the same value but every little helps (this is more interesting if you haven’t dedicated your time to build more or lessthe same site with more or less different templates just with the purpose of getting a few backlinks)
We’re talking about ranking well without links aren’t we?
Assuming that none of the above exist, my point stands. No links = no traffic.
Only for a phrase that no one is searching for… unless you want to educate me by linking your page so I can evaluate it and see something that I think isn’t possible?
No because you’re talking about bots and I’m talking about real people.
There are many factors that the engines use in ranking a site. Links is one of them. All I’m saying is that links are less important now than they used to be.
With difficulty.
Mike
Yes, which led to my question of what you think has replaced them in importance or simply became more important making links less important by comparison with previously?
I think links are as important as they ever were because there isn’t another signal that can be as reliably weighted.
Well, if links are less important than they were, then other factors must be more important than they were (relatively speaking). I suppose that would include the contents of the page, the extent to which the page conforms to various quality guidelines, the performance of the page, and so forth.
Google has said that they use over a hundred “signals” to rank a page. It seems reasonable that the relative weighting of those signals will vary over time, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the weighting of links has gone down while others have gone up.
Mike
It doesn’t seem reasonable when you consider that google’s ranking algorithm and entire search engine is built around the idea of links being a ‘vote’ for your site. Most of the other signals are to do with relevance, not the value of your page to other people.
Anyway, from your comment ‘it wouldn’t be surprising’, I’m guessing that you don’t actually have any facts here, just a supposition? That’s not a dig at you, I’m dissapointed you don’t have some facts or some kind of evidence.
http://www.boiler-breakdown-repair-london.co.uk/flue-gas-analysers-boiler-repairs-south-east-london-bromley.html
Search for fluegas analysers London brings up 200,000 returns with my page at #1. Search for yourself how many links it has. 200,000 is not huge in search engine terms, but it is still a fair bit of competition.
Thanks for linking that.
I have to say it’s what I was expecting to see. On the face of it it looks like theres some competition for that phrase, 200k pages returned, some PPC Ads, but infact the Google keyword tool is showing that there are no searches made using that phrase. Also, if you look at the pages that also rank for that phrase, they’re avery low authority pages with no backlinks, in fact quite a few of them are forum posts or what I consider ‘info’ pages which is also common for low competition searches.
All in all, it looks like that page ranks solely on on-page factors for a zero competition phrase and IMO it definitely doesn’t support the assertion that links are no longer as important as they were.
How many visits do you get from that search phrase?
Google keyword tool is not very useful for longtail research. I know for a fact that people do search for it, albeit in low numbers. The reason I know people search for it, is that the first customer I got from the call log I got last year, was a chap who specifically wanted someone who had a calibrated analyser, and was certified for it’s use.
One of the most effective ways of starting a low budget website, is to publish loads of high quality longtail pages. As my examle proves, it is perfectly possible to get pages at the topspot without links, and very fast at that.
Even more important than being in the topspot, is the fact that longtail searchers are looking for something specific, so you get a call:hit ratio which is far higher than on main stream searches. An example of that effect is demonstrated wonderfully by one of my long tail pages that covers less than 0.1% of the of the market, but is responsible for about 5% of my turnover. The search only returns about 10,000 hits.