That's right, i proved that to myself multiple times, even with just 1 year old site, although never for such a competitive kw as Viagra is, but i don't see why i couldn't rank it as well if i would have at last 5-6 years old site which is already indexed on Google for that much long time.
If you put their web site on ahrefs.com you will see the backlinks by yourself, they are crap, crappier couldn't be lol, but domain is registered in 1996, so yeah, that's the secret. Go on a google.co.uk and type in "payday loans online" you will find these bastards on #1 spot
www.themediaconsortium.org, same situation, the only difference is that in this case domain is much younger, it has been created in 2006.
Basically, go on flippa, find few years old site which is being sold for a cheap price, don't look at the niche, that's not your point of interest, purchase it, create a country based http redirection or referrer based redirection, depends what are you going to promote ( just make sure that google bot will still see the original site ) throw as much as ******** backlinks possible to your domain, make sure that main keyword is used in 30% of times, 50% of times add 10-15 relative keywords, and the rest should be half domain half random words and you will see the rankings getting up very soon.
Google will not suspend your web site so quickly either, updates does not work same on new and old sites, unless somebody reports you directly to Google which is possible if you will go for a high competitive niche, such as viagra od payday loans.