How on earth is this site ranking so highly?

[Jeepster]

I'm trying (& struggling) to rank for the keyword property in italy.

Yet in the past 5 weeks I've seen this site -- betterpropertyitaly (dot) com -- rocket from about #30 to #2 for the keyword and am trying to figure out why.

The obvious is that it's in the domain name, but that can't be the be-all-and-end-all, surely? It's a 2 yr 9 mth old site, so why the sudden spurt?

I look in Open Site Explorer and the metrics look pretty weak:

Domain Authority: 17

Page Authority: 29

Linking Root Domains: 9

Absolutely zero social shares.

Good luck to him and all -- but I'm trying to figure out what he's doing right and I'm not.

My site apart, he's beating some pretty big-hitters.

[Jeepster]

The sheer volume of pages surely isn't a ranking factor. (otherwise everyone would simply auto-generate tons of pages on their site).

He has backlinks from 9 domains of which:

gohome.it - NO-FOLLOWED

comproperty -- a forum signature. also NO-FOLLOWED

www.servicesforyouitaly.com/ -- EXPIRED DOMAIN

So that leaves six -- and other than the italymag one (which dates from 2010) they all look pretty low-rent.

Backlinks from .it domains are a huge plus when trying to rank internationally.

I'm based in the UK and looking at a .co.uk and also .com search.

My website is optimised for the term (and used to rank No1 until last year)

I'm just trying to figure out what's going on here.Why the sudden rapid rise?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Site is well optimized and has 25k+ pages indexed in G. Looking at his backlinks, he may not have many links but a few of them are very good (italymag, gohome.it, comproperty)/ Backlinks from .it domains are a huge plus when trying to rank internationally.

I don't know what your site is but you can probably get those same backlinks fairly easily. Just generate content and optimize your website for your terms and you should be able to outrank him.