TC had some pretty good questions here on competing with authority sites.

My brain hurts trying to cut through his sentence structure, so I’ll dissect it and answer piece by piece.

“How do you beat a site that is 5+ years old with a few authority links . . .

You need as many authority links as you need. I never said that a few would do. When your link farms do not produce enough, you link buyers and link ninjas need to be working overtime. Buying links really does work if you do it right.

. . . most of the links are just from pyramids/splogs/1 page sites as you described in your previous posts . . .

No. That’s just one source of links.

. . . and they are really bad as the anchor texts are all almost the same. . .

Yes. That would be terrible. That’s why you need to dramatically vary you anchor text. No more than 5% of your links should have the same anchor text. And you should only hit the 5% mark once: if your sites name is KeywordDeals.com, then you can have 5% of your anchortext say “keyword deals.” Other than that, look at natural linking structures. The distribution is huge. Any time you see 5% of links or more with the same anchor text, you know those links were spammed.

. . .with very few deeplinks . . .

Again, that would be terrible. Why would you have very few deeplinks if you know that you need a majority of you links to be deeplinks?

…. I know this is an awkward question… but any ideas would be great

Very awkward (but only in how it was written).

- The only way I seem to be able to get authority is by buying it (via old domains – dmoz/yahoo listed seems to work very well)

Yes they do. Those are just 2 good quality indicators, though. There are many more.

even when you do “buy it” it can become problematic as you have to get the niche absolutely correct otherwise things tend to go tits up.

Not true. You just need to spend more time on the transition. If the site you bought is offtopic but will be at the top of your pyramid, spend some time to make the transition slowly from the site it is now, to the site it will be. Do it in stages. Consider not deleting the old content, but transitioning them to orphan pages that link to the pages you want. This method is still the best way to bypass the age requirement.

another way I have found is by making a site that “gathers” some new content & links frequently and has done for over a year,

That’s generally not enough time: as you have seen. Unless you got a blockbuster site.

even then it is a struggle… is there some way to get authority in a shorter time span (besides buying it or waiting months?)….?

A site that is naturally a super hit: But the two ways you mentioned work much better and are more reliable.

I don’t expect you to hold my hand through this, but even a slight sniff in the right direction would be great… as I have been struggling to beat rather ordinairy sites with “trust/age” for a while now in multiple niches and just can’t seem to do it, 2nd & 3rd place is great….. but I want 1st…

What’s cool is that you already know all the right answers, you just seem to be struggling to implement what you know to be right. You know the mistakes not to make, but assume that certain methods have those mistakes built into them.

Your assumptions are wrong about what is a constant and what is a variable.

If you know something is a spam indicator (like not enough deep links, not enough authority links or all the same anchor text), the answer is not “oh well, I guess this is gonna look spammy.”

You know the answers. They are so obvious they are staring you in the face. Make the changes in your methods you know you need to make and get those number 1 rankings!