Why would a newly created site, have ranked ahead of our site for keyword that we are optimized for?

[Deacyde]

This newly created site has a DA of 1 and PA of 1, no backlinks, no optimized urls, the keyword they ranked better than us on was listed a total of 6 times on the homepage.

Our PA is 29 and DA is 18 for the page that ranks for this keyword.

They really copied a few elements of our site but made sure to change a few things, but also list at the bottom of their site 5 keywords that are crucial to our niche industry but they're all linking to the same page.

Any ideas?

It's an SEO guy running the site, we've watched them toy with adwords trying to be number 1, but not liking the price, so they are here and there with it.

Mainly I don't see why they'd rank better for this keyword, we our site have prolly 500% more content that's both of quality and relevance to our customers, in the form of Pdfs, infographics, help sections, and video.

Very baffled here, any advice would rock!

[TammyWood]

I love wild guesses, let's go:

1. Site speed

2. Usibility ( to the end user)

3. Crawlibility - is your code making it difficult for Google to crawl and index properly?

4. Do they have every single on page factor on their pages? Review their code, find what they are doing that you are not

5. Did they use Blackhat to obtain the domain? Could it have already been a high ranking domain

6. Are you blocking anything important in your robots.txt file

7. is your sitemap referenced in the robots.txt, is it accurate?

8. Do you have deep links to an app? Is your site responsive, is it mobile friendly.

Basically, you have to find what they are doing that you are not- and what they aren't doing ( there is always something).

[MattRoney]

It's not unheard of for new sites to appear pretty high in the SERPs when first indexed, and then drop off within a couple days/weeks.

It's also very possible that their PA & DA aren't really 1, and that the site is simply too new to be in our index yet.

[Deacyde]

Thank you, I do appreciate it.

I know there isn't much info to go on, without disclosing who it is, kinda hard to do so.

Gave as much info as I could, I'll check the things you mentioned, it's at least something more than I have been doing.

[EGOL]

Maybe your site is penalized and his isn't.

Maybe your title tag has misspellings.

Maybe your title tag is sleepy but he has "free beer"...  and everybody clicks it.

Maybe he has a ton of redirected links to his page and they don't show yet in the link assessment tool that you are using.

They copied your site and changed a few things... the few right things.

This isn't advice as you requested.  Advice is not possible with so little information.  So I tossed out some wild guesses.