Hey Op,
That's a pretty broad assessment of your competition. You can have 5000 back links from one article.
What kind of backlinks. You can have 3 PR7 backlinks that will smoke 5000 pr0 and pr1's.
If your competition has 5000 articles, or posts on blogs (that shit is annoying as hell), you would be surprised how easily you can outrank them now.
After Panada - I have been able to outrank big budget guys because those article sites have now all been devalued so those links don't count as much. For one site, I analyzed my competitor and every backlink went to a unique site that had a 300-500 word article with two links to his site. I was pissed because I think this guy probably paid a fortune to some article marketing company to get those up. They were all well written, I couldn't tell if they were spun or not. I decided that even if I was just below him, I would still get some traffic. After Panda hit I move up in front of him, now he's not even on the first page anymore.
The reason that I stopped spinning articles is that if your site gets a manual review, then you are toast. A spun article is easily spotted. Then the reviewer will start to dig into all your links and find more spun content. Google hates this. The bigger and more important my site, the further I stay away from spun content.
Good Luck
-Capp
