How Are Competitor's With Zero Links (According to SEOmoz) Ranking Highly?

[EdLeo]

Hey everyone! This is my first post in the community after just signing up for SEOmoz. I've already got a ton of value from this community so I'm looking for to giving back as much as possible.

The keyword gets 8000+ monthly searches on Google. Not so many, but the keyword indicates high buying intention.

The funny thing is that the top ranking page has 0 backlinks (according to OSE). It seems as though there are some black hat tactics being used, as I doubt that they are ranking solely with on-page optimization.

Any idea what's going on? Have you guys/gals seen this before?

[EdLeo]

Thanks for the replies! It was simply the www subdomain throwing things off.

Now, I've got a clear picture of the link profile for these competitors. Thanks again for helping out!

[MarieHaynes]

Likely, you looked for backlinks to www.ambienmed.com.  Try checking OSE for ambienmed.com (without the www):

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=ambienmed.com

Boom!  898 Links!

They may get busted eventually for anchor text optimization, with 114 links for "buy ambien".  However, they've got 184 links with the url as the anchor so that seems to be helping them avoid Penguin for now.

[tomcraig86]

Hi Edward, Welcome to SEOMoz!

There may be many reasons why the website in question is ranking higher than yours.

You'll need to factor in a couple of factors, regarding both your site and the competitiors.

How old is your domain? Theirs is almost 12 months old, which if I believe correctly, is long enough to avoid any 'youth website' penalisation. If yours is new then Google may not have crawled it properly yet.

Aside from this, OSE and Google do not share databases, therefore some pages that Google is aware of, OSE may not be aware of. Mozbot would need to follow links to the competitiors site for it to be added to the index (what I believe).

As a result of this, you will see 0 on the mozbar when infact there are some links pointing to it. In fact there are some (rather dodgy) links pointing to ambienmed:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=link%3Aambienmed.com&sugexp=chrome,mod=2&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

On page content can also play a part in ranking factors. Ambienmed has a wealth of content on the home page which is very keyword heavy.

Also, as mentioned previously, your competitiors are fortunate enough to have an exact match domain name.

I hope some/all of this helps!

[intSchools]

OSE is not working for me but I suggest searching using ambienmed.com (without the www.) as on Google they rank with ambienmed.com

This is a different subdomain and would be the reason there are no links to www.ambienmed.com

As well as that they are also in a fortunate position of having the keyword ambien in their domain name.