Strange Results Case Study

[Robber]

I would love to hear peoples thoughts or experiences with the following, heres the story:

Search term returns 2,000,000+ results
Websites seem optimised right down to about page 70 in the results eg they still have sensible titles etc and most sites still have around toolbar PR 4-5 down to page 70ish.

However, we have a strange result, top of page 2 has a site with following characteristics:
* toolbar PR1
* no backward links showing
* single page website - some embedded DB results
* no good inbound anchor text
* no dmoz
* nothing of anything I would normally look for
* no keyword stuffing
* couldnt see evidence of cloaking
* no redirects

Very strange. All it seems to have is a good domain name:
www.kw1-uk-kw2.net

Any ideas, please let us know.

[hmpphf]

Maybe the site has been around a long time. Try looking it up at archive.org

[Dante_Maure]

It could be a very new site. Sometimes new sites rank unusually high when they are first indexed then settle down in an update or two.

Two other possibilities...

Does it have a fresh tag? (date next to it's listing in the SERPs)
Sites that are "freshed" often get a boost.

Is there a cached version of the page? If so, click on it and see what you find. It will show you whether there are on page occurences of the keywords, or if they are attributed from inbound links.

[Robber]

The sites seems to have been around for a while - registered back in 99 - I guess it could have changed hands since.

It does have a fresh tag - although so do most of the other sites these days even quite a few pages down - further than page 6!

Checked the cache this morning - even stranger - proximity is really poor - not a single occurence matches the phrase 100%.

An anomaly!?

[Dante_Maure]

Is the key phrase you're checking identical to their domain name?

[SEOPTI]

Maybe it's an authority page.