Yahoo lists every page on my site as a link. There are thousands of pages. Including forum pages, profiles and whatever they can get a hold of. The trash starts as early as page ten, and when you start digging down it’s all blackhat.
Believe me, webber, there are not that many pages linking to me legitimately. And I don’t encourage it really, I have no link pages and I rarely exchange links, and I avoid pages that do have link pages.
Sure, in the course of 5 years a few hundred pages have linked to me legitimately, but the rest is internal links to my own content or blackhatters.
That doesn’t mean at all that you should not link to reputable, known (to you)sites in exchanges. My ranking comes from the age of the site, the fact that it has slowly over the years grown quality unique content, and I think google also looks at visitor behavior.
It is also only one way to gain ranking, there are people in this forum making more money than me without any of the above attributes and lots of good link exchanges instead.