re: links, have you heard of Mint.com? Check out their infographics as and example of aggressive, but high quality and legit link building. The one they did about 'how big is a trillion?' got hundreds of links. Here's another peice of brilliant link bait: http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator.

If you think only black hat link builders can move the needle, you aren't meeting the right people.

Also, why can't startups just raise money to buy an existing site with inbound links? A domain is just a pointer, and handled properly, there is little downside.

I don't. Excuse the cynicism but it sounds to me like you're complaining. Did you happen to be involved in a start-up that isn't doing so hot and you believe Google is to blame?

Sorry but just because this is the internet doesn't mean real world business rules don't apply. There is a difference between form and content. Your only reasons for preferring Oyster over TripAdvisor is that the page is cleaner and there are less ads? Ummm if you had actually used the two services it would become clear that TripAdvisor has better content. And again, just because this is the internet doesn't mean that there is no barrier to entry. Think about the search engine market, the social networking market, the audio statistics market (c.f. the totally off Last.fm article also curretly on the front page). Try displacing those guys.

Point is, if Oyster in fact proves to be a superior website in the long run, it will hopefully (and probably) get its due. But to expect an algorithmic search engine to order results based on hope is just... wrong.

Isn't this always the case? Startups exploit media or approaches that are new, overlooked, or both. If they weren't doing something odd they wouldn't be startups.

When they succeed, that focuses attention on the new media and techniques, and leads to crowded fields. Then the next generation has to come up with something else. Groupon did not grow on the back of SEO. It grew on a combination of Facebook, Twitter, cold-calls and good old-fashioned copywriting.

It may still be possible to succeed using some overlooked wrinkle of SEO, or SEO plus something else. It's even more likely to happen if everyone takes your advice to ignore SEO... except the one startup that doesn't.