Viral page not ranking onGoogle

[CecilyP]

A user generated talk thread on our social networking site went viral yesterday and generated around 36000 extra visits.

But, when we Google the key phrase in this thread our site is not even in the Top 50. Instead the pages are dominated by other (lesser) websites referring to the content and linking to the thread

The page is indexed

The on page SEO grade for the key phrase and variant according to SEOMoz is A

Our home page has a PR of 7 and an SEO Domain Authority of 76

We are the original source of this content

Other talk threads on different subjects in a similar category are ranking on page 1 of Google.

What's happening?

[KrisRoadruck]

Mind shooting over the Query and URL in question? I'd love to take a peek directly.

[CecilyP]

Thanks Kris. The thing is our discussion threads are indexed daily and other new talk topics were already ranking 1 on Google for the title of the thread. We were the original source and we have good site authority and PageRank...

Since the topic went viral, the sites linking to us were not necessarily friendly sites or sites even known to us. The issue is not that we need to rank for that wacky topic (which was user generated don't forget) but that despite being the original source we failed to rank at all, nowhere, while all the sites talking about us were on page one and beyond. Kind of puzzling.

[KrisRoadruck]

If it just went viral yesterday you might want to give it a few days to see ranking changes. Also remember that google still primarily relies heavily on links. Traffic != links. The other pages you mentioned may be more heavily direct-linked to than your page. My recommendation would be to hit up those people discussing your content and make sure they are placing a do follow link back to your content, preferably with an anchor text that either directly or partially matches the subject you are hoping to rank for.

[ChrisDyson]

Hi Cecily - what's the URL and I can look at your on site SEO