Keyword ranking without content or anchor text in IBL's

[Whitey]

This is a mystery to me and the example below appears fairly typical.

A competitive site network that we monitor consistantly ranks in the top 3 on Google across a whole range of keyword phrases, site - wide. Probably over 20k of pages in total. The sites are long established, generally have a TBPR 5 , and the guys seem to have been consistant ranking over many year [ ie they know what they're doing IMO ]

The keyword is a common mispelling.

A summary analysis of the findings goes like this:

1) There is no visible text using the keyword “widget”

2) “widget” is contained once in the meta keywords

3) There is a whole bunch (100s) of interlinks between other related sites in it's family

a) [thissite.com...]
"Visitors buying "red widgets" are also interested in" in bottom right

b) [thissite.com...]
Directory

c) [thissiterelatedfamily.com...]

None of these links appear to use “widget” in the link text however

4) There are a handful of other links: including some paid, some directory submissions, some natural gained (including some forum and blog posts)

However as with above none of these links appear to use “widget”

Now, if we compare it with sites that have used the keyword "widget" in the content, meta title, IBL or interlinking text, they don't rank or they rank lower.

The only possible difference I've noticed between these sites and others is the TBPR [5], though others ranking close to it are also TBPR [5] - although i don't know the relative strength in this visible range.

Has anyone any explanation on how this is happening?

[tedster]

One factor that can be completely invisible to our outside analysis of other sites is the effect of 301 redirects. They can pass backlink influence -- but we can't tell it's there!

[Webwork]

I wonder, if you could "put a timer on it", would one be able to detect the influence of 301 redirects by a barely perceptible increase in page delivery latency as the server handles the internal redirect processing?

Would probably need to be a pretty good timer and you would need to hunt for pages of the same Kb size to have some timing controls in place.

Just a wild idea but might be something to play with if one is really determined.

[Whitey]

To have *every* individual page ranking with a variation on the term with the use of 301's - is that possible?

Normally I'd of expected some sort of support to each page. Google's cache for this site says:

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: widget

I've searched back through various posts and can't find anything related to this phrase in terms of the IBL's not showing.

[edited by: Whitey at 11:17 pm (utc) on May 10, 2007]