Maybe links aren’t important anymore

This is so so weird, I have had a feeling for a year or so that Google would move away from Links and Pagerank as we know it today. Well I think we are starting to see the first sign of it, over the last few weeks an industry I work in has had a couple of sites take first page listing, nothing new I hear you say, well if I said I knew the history of one site, would that make a difference …

The site has never had any SEO work on it, even in the early days the site was designed without any thought of search engines (and still is) the only thing that ever changed was 5 years ago I pointed out they should change the title tag from something like home page and I sent them a keyword rich call to action, the on page seo looks weak, on page links are either the brand ( no keywords) or view and click:

The site has had no new links of any note, but was covered on the BBC and in the newspapers years ago.. So maybe Google just found the BBC links.. unlikely thou..

It’s dead on theme and in fairness should be in the top 20 at least, but it’s the history of the site that’s interesting me. The site was launched 2000, got a make over in 2003, and nothing else has changed apart from an image on the homepage every 4months which is a picture from the off-line catalogue, the site is a pagerank 4, the owner didn’t know what Pagerank was so I can’t get any historical data on that..

Another site in the same sector just popped in at the same time, I rang the owner of that site as well and the same story..

Take from this very small sample what you like, but at present i can’t see any reason why these 2 site have just taken top 10 placements, anyone else seeing this or am I just going mad !
Dave