Rankings by Sheer Luck?

Searched for "Los angles DUI attorney" analyzed the top organic site.


Good looking site with good on-page, good content, and tons of pages. Then I looked at the off-page stuff. It's tactics from 3 years ago, somehow this site slipped by penguin - backlinks are not relevant, not authoritative, a lot of exact anchors, weak social signals.


Then a few more results below is the ......lawyernow.com site - even worst - everything you shouldn't do.


How are these sites even ranking so well? What factors am I missing?

Google's algorithm is not black and white. Just because there are examples of websites ranking which in theory should not be, does not mean that they are nothing more than an exception to the rule. SEO is not an exact science and there are exceptions to every rule.

You will always get anomalies. Plus you can't see or know everything Google is taking into account.

Crazy Monkey said:

Then I looked at the off-page stuff. It's tactics from 3 years ago, somehow this site slipped by penguin

Click to expand...

OMG you mean black hat SEO still works in 2016? Can't be.

I don't know how that happened, but I've had a similar experience.

When I was still working for one of the top insurance companies in the world, one of the biggest challenges was to rank our new product/online platform. It took me 2 and a half months to get the main keyword to #2. For some reason I can't beat #1 even though the website was shit and didn't have proper On-Page SEO. Not even backlinks... NOTHING!

Literally no SEO was done yet it was sitting pretty at #1. It was frustrating to say the least.

You sure you aren't missing a couple .gov links there OP? The law niche is well known for one or two well placed .gov links making a good difference. However being that its LA it should still need more than that. So could be plain and simple bh tactics, which a lawyer could have the cash to hire out theoretically.

You will find such sites which will leave you without clue as to why and how they could rank. But remember google does not just use a couple of factors to determine rankings, its over 200 factors that determine it.