Time to Rank

What assumptions are being made? For instance:

- Is this assuming your competitors will not be making any changes or optimizations to their website?

- That the backlinks are from relevant sites or general content sites? What would be their page rank? Is page segmentation factored in?

- Is it assuming no optimizations are done to the site trying to rank? Meta tags only? Full optimization? If so, what would a full optimization entail?

That's just scratching the surface. It's too early yet to think of more (just woke up), but I'd imagine the list would get pretty long.

The Google algo is somewhat known, but still considered a black box, with many outside variables. That's why any true professional SEO would never make any guarantees on website position in organic search or time frame.

Although submitted later, this duplicate submission is attracting the comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2001898

Probably best to go there if you have anything to add.

I don't understand this... time to rank if you sucked at seo?

Time to rank if you just plop your domain down and wait and no one else does anything?

I can't see how this could mean anything. Please explain?