Top result, no backlinks at all

how does a URL get discovered with no references anywhere?

[corpuscle]

I have found a site which is ranking #1 on google for a niche term. The site is a single-paged, spammy, keyword-stuffed, and auto-generated. Its single page exists on the url "keywordphrase.domain.com". This is in fact one of hundreds of subdomains on the same domain, all of which host single-page websites of this type, and all of which rank at #1 for their respective terms.

A search for backlinks to each site in question reveals nothing.

A search for the subdomain, in quotes, (ie: "keywordphrase.domain.com") reveals only one result - the site itself.

According to google, therefore, each one of this subdomains are not mentioned on any other URLs on the web. How, then, did google discover these subdomains?

There are no sitemaps anywhere (and if there were, they should be shown when searching for the subdomain strings), and the main domain shows a placeholder "coming soon" page with no links on it.

Incidentally, the same subdomains rank in the top 10 for the same queries on yahoo, and again, searching for the subdomain in quotes on yahoo shows only one result - the subdomain itself.

What's going on? I can only think of two possibilities: a) the subdomain sites where submitted directly to google using their URL submission tool (in which case being #1 is most impressive, even for terms that only have around 10k results), or b) someone can pull strings. Any other ideas?

[corpuscle]

Just a quick bump as I simply cannot work out how searching for a hostname in quotes reveals only a single result - the site on the hostname itself. Doesn't this strike anyone as odd?

[ytswy]

Google's backlink search only does a selection of backlinks, and the "site.name.tld" search would only pick up results which match in the visible page.

Maybe try a linkdomain: search on yahoo?

[tedster]

Another excellent Yahoo tool for looking at links is the Yahoo Site Explorer [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com] You can easily see backlinks to any single page or the whole domain, and also exclude or include in-site links. As mentioned, Google's link: operator has intentionally never told the whole story about links, but just given a small sample of the links they have in the index.

[corpuscle]

ytswy said:

the "site.name.tld" search would only pick up results which match in the visible page.

So does this mean that a document containing a javascript link such as

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:document.location='http://keywordphrase.domain.com/';">anchortext</a>

would not appear as a result for a search for the string "keywordphrase.domain.com"?

ytswy said:

Maybe try a linkdomain: search on yahoo?

Thanks for this suggestion. Although yahoo have pulled the domain in question already, the linkdomain query did show one result - a page containing the html:

<a href="http://keywordphrase.domain.com/">keywordphrase</a>

.

So, I guess, answering my own question above, although the search string may appear in the href attribute of a link on a page, a search for that string will not bring up that page using google or yahoo.

tedster said:

Another excellent Yahoo tool for looking at links is the Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo's site explorer showed nothing for this site (I checked that before the site was removed from Yahoo's results).

tedster said:

As mentioned, Google's link: operator has intentionally never told the whole story about links, but just given a small sample of the links they have in the index.

Yes, I know it's been this way for quite some time; I only mentioned it for completeness (otherwise someone would suggest using the link: operator!)

Thank you for your help, guys.