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How to explain an odd seo/serps phenomenon?
Hey y'all
I have a question about a site I'm come across in my obsessive serps checking. All the sites that rank well for my target keywords are sites with meaningful content, normal backlink profiles...they follow all the rules of seo, as I'm aware of them at least.
That said, there's one site that's doing well for most of my target key words and I can't figure it out...the site has incredibly paltry content (I'm talking 20 words per page max, including tags) and the backlink profile is bizarre. The site has over 100k backlinks, but they mostly link to sites that don't actually exist...the few sites that do exist are mostly mainstream sites (eg: a non-profit anti-smoking website and a website that sells wrist watches). Further, the link URLs on the sites that do exist have been removed...from the set-up of the pages it looks like many were comment spam.
Is it normal for sites with little content and a bizarre backlink profile to rank well or is this non-white hat seo in practice? I'm really curious...I know panda and penguin were supposed to crack down on sites with little relevance to the purported keywords so there's either some good legit seo to this site that I'm missing or it's slipping through panda/penguin somehow. The site was built in Dec of 2012 and it started climbing in the serps a few weeks ago. I rank above this site so this isn't a jealousy thing...I'm genuinely curious as to what's going on mainly because I don't understand the situation and I like puzzles.
Anyone encountered anything like this before? Basically a site with a sentence or two per page, a bunch of tags and a profile of backlinks that don't actually exist that ranks really well in a niche that's growing increasingly competitive?
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