I have a particular question about keyword ranking

Hi All

I have been out the game a long time. I have adult sites, and one of the adult sites I have is a chaturbate white label. Chaturbate white labels can rank, but they have robots.txt which stops the page being crawled I believe

Anyway I was searching for a term, and I saw a site which was ranking for a keyword which isn't contained in the domain or the title.. non of the words

How is that done? backlink anchor text?

google have stopped favoring on-page (and meta tags) several years ago, and they now favor authority, trust, and topical authority / relevancy. In other words, big brands usually outrank well optimized sites because they're rich and powerful and google loves barebacking with the rich and powerful.

If you don't have a big brand you can also rank with a strong domain (domain with a lot of strong backlinks and high DR), or with topically relevancy (topical relevancy = everything from keywords to content, to domain name and backlinks are niche relevant).

Either one of these 3 can (and usually do) outrank sites with good on-page SEO. But I didn't know that these principles work in the adult niche as I've never dealt with this niche before, but now I can see that they do

Or, it could also be like you said: backlinks with exact match anchors... or maybe hidden PBN links, this is also a common practice nowadays

Having keywords on the domain and title only does not help.

Your competitor might have used keywords in web content and bought links with exact/similar anchor texts.