SEO Rant -Thoughts welcome

Hey all,

I've recently been looking at some of the top 10 results (for the uk) for highly competitive keywords such as "seo" "search engine optimisation" "ppc management"..

Now while some sites in the serps are hubs of useful information the majority of them are just well designed websites...

Take for example BigMouthMedia, yes the site is well designed and looks good but does it have any really excellent content on it that compells you to link to it? I would suggest no..Yet the site ranks no1 for "search engine optimisation" in the UK.

I mean there is practically nothing on those sites that makes me want to link to them...It very clear that they have achieved there rankings by aggressive backlink building....Most of the sites are no more appealing than others they just happened to have acquired tens of thousands of links...

Now of course everybody is doing this to achieve good rankings, i just think its interesting that despite the lack of really engaging and compelling content on these sites they still rank really highly...

This leads me to believe that in spite of Google big thing about 'create good content and sites will naturally want to link to you' in acutal fact they don't care....

Links will always win and if you have enough you can dominate any search term...

Just my 2 cents anyway