has it all come down to tons of content and IBL?

I canI can't believe the answer to this is IBL's. Do you?

[Diogenes]

I just put my site up. Its on page 16. In front of me are mostly forum sites where someone's post used the key phrase I am searching for high position on. The post itself used the phrase once and THE DATE of the post is often years ago.

These particular forum postings don't have back links, at least not to the post.

Can the search engine algorithm really be so screwed up that I now have to come up with 10, 40, 100 backlinks in order to advance past this heap of ancient crap

Jim

[LifeinAsia]

I just put my site up.

Patience, grasshopper... It can takes weeks or months to get ranked with a new site.

These particular forum postings don't have back links, at least not to the post.

How do you know? Have you personally searched all the billions of web pages and determined that none of them have links to that site/page? Or are you relying on Google's extremely flawed "links:" search parameter that no one relies on because it is such a joke?