Ranking Blog Posts

Well, I originally thought that blog post rankings would mainly be the reason for your rank in google. But I was looking at the amount of black links that my competitions post had, it only had 6 back links :|. When ranking posts, does the popularity of your blog influence it's rank more than the amount of backlinks on the post itself?

you should just do some multi-level linkwheels

Lol, doesn't quite answer my question though . Ohh, and I meant BACK LINKS in the opening post, not black links, lol.

You cant assume how google's algorithm works based on one example. I've seen one site outrank another for no apparent reason. One guess is the post's backlink from the site itself is providing a lot of link juice.