IMO it is a matter of aging, quality links, and megasites doing better than the small ones.
Yes, age matters, and any fast tricks are going to result in fluctuating results if not worse.
Google likes to see honest sites moving up the ladder by merit of providing quality content that is perfectly relevant to the search and unique. Just providing a review isn’t good enough anymore, make it personal, make it different. Copying what thousands of sites have already will get you nowhere. Be creative.
Build your site slowly, page by page, make sure each page has it’s own keyword, don’t stuff, make sure internal links are perfect, use sitemap, and link to quality sites only. Check your links all the time, make sure the sites you link to are reputable and follow same course.
Megasites – no. Grow too fast and it’s no good. If you want continued growth and stability, build slowly. It’s the quality of each page, not the size of the site.
If by “there is no SEO” you mean that there are no shortcuts that will pop you from unknown to top ten – you’re almost right. You can do it but it is temporary and in the long run it hurts your site and it will never be stable.
If you are serious about building business and building a player base, you need to care for your visitors. Thats who matters. If you do that, they will be loyal to you and the search engines will fall into place, given you stick with the above.
The days of bannerfarms are almost over.