Do some sites get preference over others by Google just because? Grandfathered theory

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche.

I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/

This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic)

Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com.

Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?

[zoicaremus]

Hello,

I understand clearly what you mean, and I can say I was on the other side.

I was among the first ranking in a smaller country for the most popular "blog" related queries. The page was a part of a more general website, was very solid and solved most of the problems for users searching for those particular queries. Most of the people were clicking my search result and they were pretty satisfied by what they got there. The website was old school, layout old scool. I had amazingly attractive title and meta description, I basically nailed it.

Then bigger brand names and huge websites were launched on the same queries. Solving way more problems and dealing with the matter in a new way. But I was still the first. Brands with pagerank 5 to 7 were competing with my page with no/or close to zero pagerank. I did not even have a fraction of their links and authority. I even laughed seeing that year after that I rank 1st above these big guys, they were on 2nd, 3rd and so on. A lot of years passed and I was still the first. It was really funny. And I tried to learn from it.

Then I decided to refresh and modify the layout, because it was old school. I had some problems with internal linking and domain was down for a while. Then somebody hacked my server and I got some stuff injected there. I solved most of the problems, it was not easy. But when I got back I lost the top spot. There were a lot of changes, but the URL and the content of that particular page was exactly the same.

So, from personal experience I can tell you that things can change.

I  had the following:

• I was the first to cover that area

• a lot of users were clicking on my website - CTR from webmaster tools was amazingly high, and bounce rate was low

And I can tell you that one of those ranking factors talked about a lot on seomoz - "User Usage and Traffic/Query Data" weigh way more than people think. At least from my experience. Anyway, try to ask yourself the following questions:

-> Are the differences between your website and the old one significant? Do the users see them in the search listing and do they consider them of significant importance? If not, try to give them a 10th times better reason to click on your website, and also give them what they want (sometimes the bounce rate has something to say about this, but not always).

It may look like Grandfathering, it's really hard to dismiss or confirm it. At first I thought about it the same way you do. However, first it would be very nice to answer honestly and from the user's point of view to the above questions.

Good luck!