Hi Janeth

Page ranking is (appears to be) also determined by the type of web site, business or private and many other factors, not just the quantity and quality of backward links.

I constantly review my page ranking, eg www.midkentwater is ranked as 5. It has 160 incoming links to the home page, yours has 36 and also ranks 5. Some of my links are web pages, some of course from the same site, some are from other sites but with the same IP number, and a further variation of IP's domain names, PRs etc.

As to the usefulness of backward links and search engine positioning, the context of the link is also relevant. As an example, a link to a page where the name of the link is "nutritional analysis", enough of those links and the page will be at the top of the search list for that term regardless of whether it exists within the page.

Try a search on "Nutritional analysis" on Google, look at the cached version. see the comment "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: nutritional "

Also look at the results of a search on "www.geeksonsteroids.com" (use that as the search term, I expect you do already) see how you rank on your category - that's where I got the number of backward links (also from the google toolbar of course) but also see the number of pages that 'contain the term' you have 209 which also helps PR.

A great tool for looking at backward links, but is temporarily offline is VisIT - see: http://www.visit.uiuc.edu/ but can be seen in action on this page - http://www.operatingthetan.com/google/

Good luck