Why is Google ranking this domain?

Could incoming links alone give first position?

[softwareengineer99]

For a very competitive shopping keyword a site is ranking first in Google and second in Yahoo. The site has the following characteristics:

- Title is missing the competitive keyword, though tje keywords meta tag includes the important keywords, listed first.
- The keyword is present once in h2 and li tags
- Every page I see has

<meta name="googlebot" content="index,nofollow" />

- A search for [site:www.domain.com] returns 5,920 URLs with no content indexed or cached. No snippets or descriptions in SERPs.
- The site is indexed in MSN
- 1,620 incoming links for [site:www.domain.com] Google
- 32 incoming links for [site:domain.com] Google
- No robots.txt file
- Only home page cached in Yahoo.
- Domain Expires 2011

My question is could incoming links alone give a site first position in the SERPs both in Google and Yahoo for a very competitive term, or is something else at play here?
Thanks