brianp - 5:11 pm on Nov 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm sorry but his answer to this question is laughable. There are too many real world examples where brand new websites rank in the top three for competitive terms. The only thing these websites have that others below do not are massive backlink profiles from SENuke type sites.

Could give plenty of examples, but its usually hundreds of directories and community profiles were links to the sites are anchor text for the keyword in question. Completely un-natural backlinks, yet rank in top three for a keyword that returns tens of millions of results.

So unless Google highly trusts these "websites" that these hundreds of links are coming from, I would call this a carefully worded reply to a dangerous question.