Another how the *%#^ is this site ranking question

[inhouseseo]

I saw a question posted by someone a while back asking how a certain (in their opinion crappy) site was ranking in the top then.

It happened that there were some good reasons for that site ranking.

Well.... I have stumbled on a site that seems to be ranking for (almost) no reason at all:

• relatively low DA/PA

• very few inbound links (none seem to be that special)

• thin content

The only thing I can think of, is that the site has the keyword in the domain name. But looking at the search results, there are other domains with exact match keyword in URL and somewhat stronger metrics that don't rank.

[inhouseseo]

I am sure those reasons are part of the answer.

When ran the site through OSE, I saw 18 inbound links. That is fewer links than other sites ranking in the top 10. So, I thought maybe the site has a high domain authority. That was not the case either.

I think I figured out the reason (in addition to what you listed):

• They have a lot of unique content on their pages. Even product pages.

• When I run a backlink analysis on Majestic, the number of links are much higher.

Mystery solved!

[irvingw]

This site does not look that bad to me, why should it not rank?

a) pr3 homepage

b) a large amount of pages indexed with unique anchor texts and title tags

c) good breadcrumbs and decent url structure

d) no obvious keyword stuffing

[irvingw]

What's the URL?

[loopyal]

Probably because google has killed all their competition and they are the last ones standing.

[Gamer07]

Interesting. I guess you are right. There are only two domains in top 10 with those two keywords in the domain name. I don't think Exact Match is a huge factor anymore but that's the only explanation in this case.