Unoptimized aged domain with one article ranks #8

So I'm buying a lot of aged/PR domains these days. A lot of my sites tanked over Penguin so I plan on making a private blog network.

One of the sites that decreased in rank is one that was #3. Currently it is not ranking (couple of days ago was on page 2/3). The keyword is low/low-medium competition.

Because I was bored I wrote up an article of about 1000 words and posted it one of my aged domains yesterday (no PR). Its the only article on this domain.

Let's say the keyword is "blue widgets", the KW is not part of the title tag, meta description etc. It is only in the article itself.

I link out to my tanked site twice with anchor text: "blue widgets".

Today I search for "blue widgets" and guess what? This aged domain that is totally NOT OPTIMIZED for this keyword is ranked...#8.

Not sure how this happened... sure I knew age played a factor but this big of a factor?

Yeah this aged domain has backlinks to it but I'm not sure if they play a huge role either. (Haven't built significant backlinks after purchasing the domain)

Thoughts?

It is most likely experiencing the boost Google gives to fresh content. Check it in a week or two and draw your conclusions then.

Interesting scenario for sure, I've seen this a few times now where on-page SEO optimization seems to hurt rankings and raise a flag with G. Some of my competitor's are quite successful by purposely ignoring on-page SEO or just doing 'general niche terms' for title, h1, <strong>, etc... With your example, they might say "Widgets Guide" but still rank strongly for "blue widgets".

Personally, I'm having trouble de-programming myself not to optimize the on-page SEO but I might have to get on board with this soon. I had one site that got owned by Penguin show up at #3 after I set 'noindex, nofollow' for the entire site. Literally, the site shot back to Page 1 within 24 hours. It has been 3 days now and it is still holding on. I cannot make any sense out of that.

I like your plan on buying/utilizing the aged domains and it stands to reason they would be able to handle a solid, slow linking campaign better. Keep us posted on if your rank holds up and good luck.

Hows the competition for the keyword. Sounds like its pretty low. But congrats anyway! Aged domains are great.

I agree with Assphuck, I had this happen to me recently.. stayed on he first page for about 10 days and dropped to #34 overnight, hasn't moved off the third page since.

I bought several aged domains with weak existing backlinks a while back (all registered in 96-98) to do some testing with 301 redirects to my actual money sites. I put up a niche-specific article on each one and got them indexed, then did a 301 and got them crawled again. This was in late March and had no noticable effect on the sites I pointed them at (1 aged domain per site).

A few weeks ago while moving servers I somehow lost the 301 code in the headers of these sites without realizing it. A few days later I started getting a ton of extra traffic on my server and I couldn't figure out why. It ended up being one of the aged domains - despite being a POS with 1 poorly spun article and crappy backlinks, there it was at position 7 for an extremely seasonal (hence the spike) med/high comp keyword. I quickly redirected it again to the money site it used to be attached to (that was still ranking poorly) and enjoyed a good 10 days with lots of extra adsense revenue. Sadly, the site eventually fell back off when Google picked up the redirect. This time there was a noticable effect on the money site, but it only went up to 20 or so from the change.

Interesting, one of my sites with 100% onsite SEO score that has been being drip fed .edus and other diverse links, as well as linkpushing etc. has been fairing the worst of all my niche sites so I have nothing to lose so just changed to not to be indexed. See if any magic happens, seriously if that shoots it up what a bunch of absolute pricks...my god I hate G except when i'm on top, that's a great feeling...til i hit reresh. Thanks for the info all, if I have anything interesting to report i'll report back, or maybe i won't. That'd be something wouldn't it....give massive exposure to those who do not want to be in listed cause surely they cannot be spammers and taking revenue away from adwords.

I've actually been noticing a similar trend in some of the niches that I'm competing for. After penguin, almost all of the sites on the first page of a variety of my target keywords are all older domains. The crazy thing is that most of these sites have little to no on-page SEO, and less than 100 backlinks on any of them. What's even more strange is that very few, if any of the backlinks have targeted anchor text... I'm actually pretty flustered over how exactly these sites are ranking as well as they are. I should note; the keywords they are ranking for are highly competitive.

I set up a something similar pre penguin, aged domain, no kw in domain, threw up a crappy spun article, been bouncing around #1-3 for the last couple of months. Not a super competitive kw obviously, but a kw my optimized money site isnt ranking for. And this domain has almost no links lol

Yeah looking at it now its probably what assphuck suggested with the fresh content and this probably won't hold for more than a week or so. Will update with what happens after some time.

I would also agree that it was just the freshness aspect if it was a new domain, but this is not that uncommon with aged domains.

Age is a huge factor and unless I need a specific domain name for branding etc I only ever buy aged domains these days.

Given it's an aged domain I wouldn't be surprised if it stays where it is.

Aged domains over EMD's ftw. Plus you can ramp up the link velocity on aged domains more so than without them as well.

In this case I think the main reason this happened is because of the quality and length of your article.

Google gets smarter every day when it comes to recognizing that.

Good job