Well, yes it can.  This makes it clear that I still haven't explained myself well. Google doesn't care what your site is about or how big or small it is, it only cares about about those indicators of usefulness.  So, no matter how much competition there is, it can be outperformed by making your own page appear to be more useful.  In reality, only budgets and time constraints affect that.

As for the ranking rankings thing, we've discussed that in the past and you have a completely different perspective from me an what constitues SEO.  Most of what you consider SEO I just consider building a poperly structured website and I'd do it even if there were no search engines.

Of course, that's what makes Google the best search engine, because it doesn't rely on the website builder to tell them how good their site is, it relies on other people 'voting' for it with links.

I don't put much weight or reliance on on-page factors, it takes 15 seconds to optimise a page for a keyword (assuming the page is already about that subject) so let's assume relevance to the search is a given and that google is now trying to decide where that page should rank out of all the pages it found on the search subject.

It mostly looks at those links from the trusted sites like you said.  Getting those links is damn hard, unless of course you can provide something that's useful to that trusted site's visitors so that the site owner givers his own users a way to leave his site and go somewhere else.  It's a beautifully simple model and the best way to replicate it is genuinely.


It's not my definition that matters, it's Google's, but it's a hugely important concept to understand I think, in SEO.  It's almost so obvious that you don't think about it, when in fact it drives the ranking algo and is the correct perspective to look at SEO from IMHO....

Google want their index to be useful to people right? Or people won't use Google anymore.  Google can't directly influence the content of their index, they don't build the sites, but what they can do is tell us what they want to see and give us tools to help us achieve that.  They've had a massive influence on how modern websites are structured.  In that respect they appear to support SEO when in fact the oposite is true, they wnat us to build properly structured websites then let nature take it's course, but by telling us a few things about how to rank well (although they never word it like that of course), they get a better quality of site.... hopefully.