Links playing a bigger role at MSN?

I was fooling around checking some SERPs at MSN. I entered the phrase - Pharmacy Technician - at MSN. This is a highly competitive search term web wide. Take a look at the #3 result. It is a page belonging to www.pharmacytechnician.com and the result page title shown is "Home" but when you click through it is this really long title with code showing through at the top of the page.

I've known the links are important to MSN. It seems possible backlinks have a significantly stronger influence on ranking than on-page optimization? Any thoughts?

Not very sure,but it look like that.
For one of my site, I got quite a good number of links from directory submission in a week and in the next week the site came at 6th position from 28th.
In the next week I got no links at all for the site,the site went back to 15th position.
I think fresh inbound links are playing a role in MSN.

The Keywords in domain name are working at present at MSN/Live.. Go figure, If you figure it out, then buy a domain with keyword in it, and work on it before Live changes its algo..

One of my sites came up to rank one for a very competitive keyword from rank 148 a few months back..just coz it has the direct keyword in the domain name

believe it or do a little research and u will figure out whats happening..

Last but not least, Links do have importance for every engine, perhaps MSN for now has kept it a secondary issue.. capitalize that

It's quiet easy to rank a keyword that is also in your domain. That keyword is very specific that causes your site ranked well.

i think that is called redirect links. in which i also think is illegal.

I think what they mean is having a critical keyword in your domain name, not a redirect. I'm not sure it helps a ton though in highly competitive phrases.