'Poor' Site Ranks High for Competitve Term

Why?

[rioroccoroma]

I am working on a site that will have to compete in a competitive area online, so I am understandably nervous about how I am going to fare. Anyway - to get going I typed in some of the most popular phrases for my website into Google today and noticed that a site that should not be on top, (at least as far as I can work out), is still occupying position 1 on Google.

The site has :
1) barely any content
2) consists of only 6 pages
3) 5 of them have hardly any text
4) Has an Alexa rating (for what it is worth) of 4,300,0005)
5) According to Yahoo Site Explorer has 7 incoming links (not counting links from within its own domain)
6) Counting its own internal links, it has a further 15 incoming links
7) All incoming links (as listed by Yahho) are from sites with a PR of 0
8) Google's site: query lists 30 incoming links, but they are all internal, it lists no sites linking in at all.
9) Home page has PR of 1/10
10) Google does not have a cached snapshot of the page

Sites that rank lower than the one described above are rich, large, fully featured, high content sites simply loaded with information.

It makes the job of trying to compete really difficult if you see a site that seems so rubbish, being ranked at position 1.

What have I missed?

[ronburk]

What have I missed?

The percentage of people who click on their SERP and do not return to Google to search elsewhere.

[texasville]

never can tell. it might have been around since 1996. sometimes that seems to carry a lot of weight.

[vite_rts]

That age factor seems very strong actually

[rioroccoroma]

Thanks. I have looked and the domain appears to be 2 years old. Is that old?

[SEOPTI]

9) Those sites for sure don't have PR 1, you can't see their real time PR!

[theBear]

"10) Google does not have a cached snapshot of the page"

As in no cache link at all?

If so maybe that site fed the bot special bot kibble ;-).

[rioroccoroma]

SEOPTI : 9) Those sites for sure don't have PR 1, you can't see their real time PR!

OK - it is not real time but it was the best I could do!

theBear : I wondered if someone had helped the site get to where it is using 'special techniques'. How could I find out? Or should I not care, just shrug my shoulders and get on with my work?

[dangerman]

Often, 'special techniques' produce a temporary rise in the rankings. So if the high ranking is gone in a month or earlier, that will be the likely reason.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about it and get on with building more quality pages around the subject area described by the key term.