New site w/ no backlinks gets 1st page listing in Google

How can this happen?

[J_Mac]

I have seen a fairly new website, lets say it is widgets.net, get on the first page of Google serps for the keyword 'widgets'.

This site has no inbound or outbound links and about 20 pages of articles.

I on the other hand have gone to great lengths to optimize and acquire good inbound links to get to the postion on the first page for 'widgets'.

I was always under the impression that good inbound links we essential to getting positioning like this.

I am curious if anyone knows how this could happen to a new site?

[steve40]

It could just be down to well optimised site before sandbox kicks in , if still there in 6 weeks would be suprised but it may also have some heavy backlinks from authority sites that are not yet showing as backlinks,

steve

[PotteryCentre]

Just want to share my experience,

I also have a really new domain (around mid July this year), luckily i got really good domain name.

I bought this domain because one of my client (in the same industry) wants to build his website and need to see sample related site.

I developed the sample site for about a month and by that time, I also submit it to the search engine.

Surprisingly, around end of Sep 1st week this website already showing in google 1st page using 2 words term of the site name over around 20 millions pages.

Don't know how the SE rank this site?

Later on, I begin to think about using this website seriously... :)

[andrew13_k]

From my experience it could be redirect from the other site, which used to be on this position in google.
Now old site gone and you never know how did he get this place, as new one has no backlinks and the old one is impossible to know.

[jetteroheller]

All the competitors of this keywors are victims from

June 27
July 27
August 17
September 15

So since all the other domains are filtered, the new one is the only not having a filter penalty

[trinorthlighting]

We have newer sites that rank like that as well. Its not all about links or age, a lot of times its about content, layout, and solid webpage building skills.

[J_Mac]

Some other things I have uncovered about the site:

- The homepage has about 50% duplicate content from another site they own.

- The rest of the site's pages are dynamic .php and also have duplicate content from various sources.

- The site's owner has about a half dozen related sites of similar content all hosted on the same server and showing the same ownership.

I don't know, but I thought these were things to avoid when trying to rank well for several sites.

Oh well, I think its funny to see a site get to position 5 out of 2 million in this manner.

[g1smd]

Just because Google doesn't report any backlinks, doesn't mean to say that there are none existing.

Use Yahoo to find out roughly how many actually exist.

[nippi]

Its not possible to for the board members to provide any meaningful insite other than guessing without knowing the url, then there are dozens of things that could be checked to see which one it is.

Suffice to say, you'll not find anyone here that beleives you can launch a new site, and then with so few pages and no backlinks, get a solid top ranking in any kind of competitive category.

I appreciate WebmasterWorld TOS prevent url posting, perhaps sticky it to someone, my money is on it being a 301 from another site.