How did this site come top in Google?

[kidekat]

I have just done a search on Google for a really, really common word. Of the 3,580,000,000 sites that were found the top one apparently has a page rank of zero and no back links. However, it comes top in the Google directory.

It is definitely showing up in the natural search, rather than a sponsored listing.

Please can anybody explain this to me.

[jeremy goodrich]

If you are looking for a rock solid, fact only, concrete explanation of why site X ranks for keyword 'widgets' -> sorry, only Google engineers can give you that. ;)

However, if you want to learn more about how google works, my best advice is to check out some of the following links:

Google News Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com] (loads of good pointers)

Google Knowledgebase [webmasterworld.com]

Google News forum library of posts [webmasterworld.com]

Last, what I can say is that the two main aspects of Google's traditional algorithm are inbound links from other domains, and the text on the page.

If somebody links to you with <a href="http://www.webmasterworld.com/">Widgets</a> then your site, if you have 'widgets' throughout the page in the title, headers, etc - will probably show up someplace in the rankings for 'widgets'.

If you have the most links to your site / with the word 'widgets' in the anchor text (see above) then, odds are, you'll come up 1st for 'widgets'.

This is greatly over simplified, but is the basic idea of 'how google works'.

[NFFC]

>explain this to me

The title shown in the SERP is a pretty big clue in this case.

[synergy]

3.5 billion sites for one keyword? :)

[NFFC]

There are some very common words.

[steveb]

Didn't whitehouse.gov used to be PR9? I'm showing 10 now.

[yonnermark]

the site that does well for the search term referred to by NFFC has over 6000 backlinks according to google... many more if you beleive the "only show PR3 and above" backlinks idea.

what search term are you talking about?

[dirkz]

NFFC, do you really think "keywordblub" in the domain name is counted as "keyword" by google? Or do you imply that most links for this particular page are "keyword blub"?

Btw, it seems to be just a freshly installed redirect.