when checking competition, how do you explain exceptions?

sometimes when checking competition for valuable keywords, you have that one ugly site that is ranking despite having very few backlinks.
like site #1 has excellent backlinks
site #2 has excellent backlinks
then you have site #3 which looks like it was made in 1995, with 3 backlinks.
site #4 has excellent backlinks
site #5 has excellent backlinks

I have checked the backlinks using tools that most people do not block, so I dont think he is blocking.

I would say this happens for 20% of tough niches that I check. 20% of the time there is that one weird ugly site which is ranking despite no backlinks.

any ideas what's going on here?

nonai said:

sometimes when checking competition for valuable keywords, you have that one ugly site that is ranking despite having very few backlinks.
like site #1 has excellent backlinks
site #2 has excellent backlinks
then you have site #3 which looks like it was made in 1995, with 3 backlinks.
site #4 has excellent backlinks
site #5 has excellent backlinks

I have checked the backlinks using tools that most people do not block, so I dont think he is blocking.

I would say this happens for 20% of tough niches that I check. 20% of the time there is that one weird ugly site which is ranking despite no backlinks.

any ideas what's going on here?

Click to expand...

Sure you haven't missed any backlinks? Also if a site was made in 1995 and has run continuously since then, Google does like that to an extent. Age does not necessarily equal authority though and there could be other factors you're missing.

My mentor (a 60 year old dude by the way) has a website that has maybe 20 links, all completely natural and white hat, but has been running it since 1996 and it ranks in the top 3 for many aviation keywords in the UK. Bear in mind though that these links are all on related (i.e. aviation) websites and additionally that PageRank means nothing right now because the last update was 11 months ago to the day, I personally only look at PA and Majestic's TF.

And what would those tools be "that most people do not block"? Maybe they were actually blocked. Spyder spanker has a very long list of bots it blocks, so when installed, it can block virtually every single link crawler/bot you can think of.

If you are right and it's ranking with only several backlinks, it's probably in that position because of it's age. Also, verify that there aren't any 301 redirects to the domain as link crawlers don't index 301s as well as they do links.

PBN magic in action.

I've seen a few of these man and it is hard to shake them.

A site that is really old, and really niche related, that has been considered an authority even though it's links don't warrant it.

Either robots are blocked on inbound links, or it's purely on its age.