Need help deciphering how this guy is getting SEO traffic with ZERO backlinks

I checked his site in ahrefs, semrush and majestic seo. They are all coming back with 0 backlinks yet somehow miraculously, this guy is ranking and getting decent SE traffic. Any other way to check what the hell he is doing? He is using a dynamic XML sitemap and has tons of thin content pages. Any ideas?

he's cloaking ahref, semrush, majestic etc.
that is, he builds links to an intermediate domain, for ex. Domain1.com, and 301 from this domain to MoneySite.com
In domain1.com he puts a cloaking script that blocks or make ahref, semrush, majestic and the others stay put. i.e., those link crawlers wont see the 301 redirect, only real visitors, hence they report 0 backlinks to MoneySite.com and will report backlinks profile to Domain1.com - but, you dont know / cannot know what is domain1.com

You can do the same trick with rel=canonical tag

Redirects, look around you'll find gold. Enough said

Depending on the competition, it might just be good OnSite SEO and some authority of the domain.

Aside from that, either redirecting some domains that don't allow majestic seo/ahrefs/opensiteexplorer crawlers or a blog network disallowing the same services.

Almost definitely redirecting. It's a well known procedure. Gorang here on BHW has written a very good step by step and has an extremely smart website that has this method of traffic filtering down to a tee.

Scritty

thanks guys will research the forum for more redirect info.