How is this site ranked so high on Google?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

How on earth does "southeastasiatravelblog.com" rank No 3 on Google for "Asian travel blog"? It's just a collection of basically PR type travel articles. I have profiled its backlinks using Open Site Explorer and 71% of them are dead. The rest seem to be mostly "run of site" links from his other websites, which aren't particularly travel or Asia related. The highest PA for a live backlink to this site is a link from within his own website (PA 27, DA 15). Most of his backlink anchors are URLs and look fairly EMD to me. The site has few shares (6 FB shares, 7 FB likes, 1 Twitter share).

So what makes it rank so highly for this phrase?

My site I'm comparing against is "travelnasia.com" which is a fairly new domain with a DA 23, PA 31 and about the same amount of shares but far fewer backlinks at this stage because I recently changed URLs to shake off what might have been an algorithm penalty from Google. I am now receiving a growing level of Google search traffic again, but it's a long climb back. I'm looking at strategies, which is why I was checking out the site above.

[WilliamKammer]

SEO tools are an indicator. Never rely on one exclusively. Also, Moz looks at white hat factors. Your competition may not be playing by the rules. If that's the case, just hope Google handles them and keep doing your thing the right way.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Thanks all. The fact that this is a smaller website and not particularly well connected is what's intriguing me. If this site can get ranked well on Google (and I haven't tested it across a range of key phrases yet), then I should be able to get mine to rank at least as well. Mine is much more up-to-date.

My site also has a responsive WP theme, long posts, keywords in URL and embedded maps. I need to work on the home page as it is currently just a list of recent posts, so it doesn't help me rank for my "brand" phrase.

In many ways southeastasiatravelblog.com is doing everything wrong from an SEO angle. His URL is too long. It's almost EMD in nature. He has way too many links on his home page. Moz On-Page Grader ranks it "F" for "Asian travel blog" - scores an absolute zero! By comparison, my home page rates an "A" from Moz for this key phrase. It makes me wonder if Moz page gradings have any real value at all.

[JaneCopland]

Agreed with the other guys here - you often see Google place sites like this in the SERPs for queries of similar competitiveness to this. It's not the internet's most competitive keyword but is also one that carries with it a lot of interest and can be profitable if the travel blog is operating as an affiliate. This example seems very closely related to the query, and Google is known to also often place "smaller" websites like this in the mix to make a change from giants like MSN, newspapers, travel guides on big sites, etc.

[WilliamKammer]

Totally agree here.

Keep in mind, there is a lot of more to the ranking ability of a site for a specific keyword than just PA, DA, links, and social.

On-page, the context of the links, etc. There's a ton of things, and Simon nailed it: if you don't know why something ranks, study it, it's an extremely valuable piece of information. It's hard not to just hate on a site and think it "got lucky," but it's ranking for a reason.

[simonberenyi]

It's on a responsive WordPress theme

• long page length

• high resource value

• Keywords in URL

• interesting choice of description and title content and format

• Nice file structure, repeating "southeastasiatravelblog.com"

• Embedded maps

Asking why it should be ranking as it is, should sometimes be reversed to ask, why shouldn't it rank well? What are your first thoughts? Sometimes sites with this kind of activity are one new crawl away from a ranking adjustment, but I also think they can offer clues as to how Google etc rank sites - anomalies are sometimes gems to be studied for your own success.