Over the last 2 years, I've watched my business go from the 4th page of results for important searches, to always ranking as #2-4 on page 1. More than anything else, what made the difference was time. In my experience, Google heavily rewards old backlinks and old websites -- much more than it used to around 2005. Maybe it's an anti-spam technique, since age is a hard thing for black hat SEOs to fake.
> More than anything else, what made the difference was time.
Because it's impossible to fake the age of a domain. If you have a long-running site with lots of old links from other long-running sites, it has phenomenal pagerank power.
I am aware of this because I have been a volunteer admin and the DNS contact for blogs dating back to circa 2004. My inbox is an absolute river of people sending me offers to write articles, infographics, helpful "corrections" for "broken" links etc etc et bloody c.
There's a reason so many people buy up expired domains, it's common to either start a new site with an aged domain or 301 redirect them to your site for the extra boost
