The website is legitimate, but the backlink profile has lots of PBN links. I want to know how they managed to get 40k links from one site and create a PBN like that.
I'm honestly not following you...
Like, first of all, I don't see 40k backlinks coming in from 1 site anywhere in those screenshots. I'm only seeing 27k as being the most backlinks that are coming in from one single site (dagoldnews.com.ng) which doesn't even look like a PBN site to begin with...
But then again, I never use SEMRush so I might not be reading something correctly??
Secondly, RDs are more important than backlinks, so if your site has 1 million backlinks but which only come from 3 RDs then you're only having 3 "backlinks" from an SEO perspective. That is to say that you can easily acquire 1000s of backlinks from one single site in a short amount of time if that site mentions your site in their sidebar for example... or in the footer. Sidebars / footers / headers are usually shared by every single page of one's site, and if you have 10k pages on your site and the footer / sidebar loads on each one of those 10k pages (which it usually does) then bam, you've just acquired 10k links!
This could very easily be the case with the 27k links coming in from that nigerian site which, by the way, looks pretty big to me, so it's conceivable to say that they're linking to the photography site from 1000s of pages via a category-specific sidebar or something.
Of course, this could still be a PBN, I'm not totally dismissing this possibility, all I'm saying is that at a first glance everything looks legit to me. The photography website has been existing for several years now so they've had a lot of time to organically acquire all of those links, I genuinely see nothing wrong with this
at a first, superficial glance.
Anyway, my response to how they managed to get 40k links from one site is that they've gotten them via a category-specific sidebar or footer. But you can probably find this out if you analyze those 40k (which are only 27k) links more closely and see for yourself how they've managed to do this
As for google not detecting / penalizing this, I can only say that I don't see how they could do it. Everything looks as legitimate as possible to me, and the googlebot is stupider than a human, so I don't think it has any real proof to judge the site by to label it as PBN.
almost no content at all and is ranking #1 for a lot of important local keywords
I'm seeing this, too, in a niche that I'm researching and which I want to get into. I've found a dozen keywords (some of them with good search volume) for which there are only 2-3 pages with content, while everything else is filled with blank pages, pinterest, youtube, and stores. It's true that most of the keywords that I'm researching could very easily be considered buyer keywords.
Like, for example, I'm researching a keyword like "border collie breed", or "old english sheepdog breed", etc. and these keywords can very well have buyer intent (as in, people typing these keywords into google are looking to buy these breeds of dogs), but they could also have informational / educational intent (people might just want to know how these breeds look like, or to find out more information about these breeds in general.)
So, I can see why the sites of dog breed sellers pop up in top 10, but then I don't understand why pages without content pop up, too since those pages don't cover either intent (they're clearly not selling any dog since there's no mention about this on their pages, and they're also not covering the informational / educational intent either since - again - there's no information about those dogs on these pages.)
What I'm trying to say (with regards to your question) is that either...
1) google is a total mess nowadays (which is probably the real explanation for why we see such lousy pages ranking for such good keywords)
2) the competition had toned down a lot, and there are probably millions of keywords in every big niche, that are up for grabs since a lot of the easy quitters have... well... quit
3) they are long tail keywords that really nobody targets for whatever reason (they don't like the search volume, they've gone out of business because google - understandably - fucked up their business, etc).
If I were to guess why your competitor is ranking for those important keywords my first guess would still be hidden PBNs. If the keywords are important like you say (although I don't know what "important" means for you with regards to keywords) then they have to have some PBN links that are undetectable by the crawlers of SEO tools.
If that's not the case then I think the next best explanation would be really long tail keywords that nobody targets so google has nothing better to show for those keywords so it shows blank / bad pages (yay for us, the non-quitters!
)... or maybe your competitor's site is aged and topically relevant enough to dominate the SERPs based on these 2 factors alone.
It's hard to know without checking everything in more depth, but these are the 3 main reasons that I'm thinking of....
