How does this site rank no 1 for big terms with no optimisation?

[JeusuDigital]

Hi,

A client recently asked me abut a site that appears to have popped up out of nowhere and is ranking for big terms within their industry: http://bit.ly/11jcpky

I have looked at the site for a particular term: Cheap Beds I was using unpersonalised search on google.co.uk with location set to London.

The site currently ranks no 1 for that term and other similar terms.

The question is how?

SEO Moz reports no backlinks (they must have blocked?) Ahrefs and Majestic report report some backlinks but not many and no anchor text with the term in. The Page title and meta do not contain the term nor does the page seem to contain the term anywhere. The domain does have some age though has no keyword match in the URL. I'm a little stumped to how they are achieving these results.

Any Ideas Anyone?

[JeusuDigital]

I thought this may be the case initially but its not as they have been ranking for a while now, also their backlink profile is not anchor text targeted.

The only real backlinks I can see for them is Groupon, is Google favouring sites featured on Groupon?

[PaddyDisplays]

how recently has the site been ranking?  Maybe the site got a load of targeted backlinks very quickly  (black hat) and OSE has not picked them up yet.

I have seen this before were the site will rank for a few days ( maybe a week +)  before google realises it spam and dumps it.

[JeusuDigital]

I am aware of other parts of Google's alg's though generally the above mentioned algs are required for a decent listing, location of your server does not make a huge difference and yes agreed with .co.uk making a difference but the site in question is not .co.uk its .com so that point is irrelevant.

The question is not about my clients site ranking higher but a site that ticks none of the major alg factors being number 1 for a big search term.

No optimised meta for target keyword, no optimised backlinks for target keyword, no onpage optimisation for target keyword and a low social metric score.

The only optimisation I can see is meta tags, which Google does not use any more and apparently can do more damage than good if you spam in them which technically this site is doing.

I have also ran the Moz onpage report card for the term Cheap Beds and they get an F! In comparison to the next site down who get a B.

The website is very relevant for the term my question I suppose is how does Google know its relevant without it being optimised?

I am thinking either LSI which doesn't make a lot of sense in this situation, or Google is actually doing some sought of price comparison and working out that their products are cheaper than elsewhere, or Google is actually taking their meta tags into consideration (Highly Unlikely!)

Any suggestions please?

[BlueprintMarketing]

There are 200 total parts to Google's algorithm so for me to give you for you to give me only two metrics and for me to give you an honest answer is absolutely impossible unfortunately. However, that domain is ranking higher than you for whatever the keyword search I can twopence is what he said in UK. Make sure that your server is running out of UK mean to say that I mean that the IP address originates in the UK, and you already have a.co.uk  TLD I'm assuming? All those things give me one bit. But you've given me two metrics there are so many others nearly 198. If you want an excellent resource I was going to distilled.net/u

sincerely,

Thomas