Interestingly enough, the need for mod_rewrite, html extentions, and PR are all becoming devalued in all the newer SE algorythms. 6 months ago a PR 7 would get you super high rankings because PR was so heavily factord into rankings. Up until a few months ago having clean URLs was extremely important. Now, anchor text is huge- links from quality related sites (or even unrelated if you use good anchor text) tells all the major SEs what your site is about. It is called "Offpage SEO". A good example of this can be seen on google by doing a search for miserable failure. Although that text is nowhere on that top page of the SERPs, apparently enough people have links from their sites that say this page is the most relevant for that keyphrase.
Dani has done an outstanding job in link building, which probably has a lot to do with this forum's popularity. I know since I started my campaign I have probably run into her at least 5 times in different places online in the past 2 weeks.