No backlinks Vs 1000's

After some rearranging on yahoo/bing today I went from a page 1 spot to a page 3 space spot. But what gets me the most is the site that now is in the spot I was is only show about 35 backlinks while mine shows over 14k. What exactly does one do to get such high rank with no backlinking? I know backlinks aren't everything but that I don't get. I am ranking low on google for the same keywords but am not getting any traffic. (Position 6 and lower) This happened to me about a month ago where I wasn't even top 100 for about 5 days and it came back but this seems a little different. Anyone else see huge drops today on yahoo and bing?

i feel ya. im competing with a 1st spot page that has zero back links while the main domain has 6k. the only thing i can see difference is content. the main domain is kijiji, and the content is updating almost hourly. recently ive seen a shuffle going on in google. the local 7 box has been replaced with the local 10 box every now and then and the guy that was in 2nd spot is now in the 20th page. id say if you keep pumping in new unique content with basic onsite seo you can't do no harm!

I need to start updating my content more often I guess. But the site/sites beating me out now haven't updated content in months. I wonder what it could be?

i don't have any concrete figures to back this up but i wonder with the recent google update whether some of the links from content farms/article directories are passing less value than they used to.

u might also need to look at the number 1 site and see what links he has to the links. maybe there is a lot of link juice being passed through the links.