How did this little site rank #2?

[AdoptionHelp]

Keyword: "adoption agency"

Site: http://www.opendooradoption.org

These guys are ranked #2 for this very competitive term in all US regions. They're beating Bethany (and my company) who are orders of magnitude larger in both company size and link profile. Their domain authority is 40, and they have less than 200 links pointing to them with "adoption agency" in the anchor according to OSE. Their on-site is pretty much nonexistent.

Does anyone have any theories as to how they accomplished this?

[AdoptionHelp]

Good point donford. I first noticed this maybe a week ago... knowing that rankings can shuffle like you described I bit my tongue and waited a bit. For some reason today it popped back into head and I did a search in several regions and found them still ranking.

Maybe I'm asking this too soon? I'm not sure how long the google shuffle lasts.

Honestly I don't mind that they rank #2, I just want to know their secret

[donford]

Ryan out of curiosity did this just happen, or have they maintained this position for awhile (weeks+)?

As you may already know, Google randomly ranks or serves sites which have no business being in the top pages. This is more of a Google test on how people perceive a site, and typically only last a couple days.

We recently had a new site come out of the blue ranking #1 for a keyword we have dominated for many years, within 3 days they were gone out of the top 50.

I personally would only be alarmed if this positioned had been maintained for extended periods of time.

Hope that helps

[AdoptionHelp]

heheh yeah I wasn't impressed when I clicked through to the site either. I guess the 13k pages may have something to do with it, although amazingly many of them just 404 like this page http://www.opendooradoption.org/china_girl.htm (and wth were they going to have on that page anyway??). My site only has 2k+ indexed in comparison, but I don't feel good about churning out crap content, so that'll have to stay the same for now.

[AdoptionHelp]

Thanks for the reply Phil! I may give that a try.

[irvingw]

good lord that site is the worst site i've seen in a long time! It was all pieced together, the directory structure is all over the place. It looks like a couple of sites were combined to make one site which may be helping it reach critical mass.

This first URL is the same as the second one and both are indexed:

http://www.opendooradoption.org/Content/Default/13/207/0/pregnancy-gps/pregnancy-gps.html

http://www.pregnancygps.org/Content/Default/13/207/0/pregnancy-gps/pregnancy-gps.html

It's a complete disaster but for some reason Google is giving it a pass.

Two things going for it:

a) the homepage is PR4

b) they have 13,500 pages indexed in Google.

[PracticeFusion]

This is very interesting.

This might be showing the power of their title tag and URL. They have "adoption agency" in the title tag and "adoption" in the URL. Bethany.org doesn't have either. Still a bit baffling though.

If you're up for a test, try changing your title tag to start off with "adoption agency". Of course, only do this if it's right for your business.