Does Content now Trump IBLs? PR5 with ZERO Inbound Links

[Kristos]

I came across a small site without a single Inbound back-link in yahoo or google and it has a PR5. I changed my user agent to goolebot 2.1 to see if black hat was in play, but no difference.

The site is extremely themed, only a few pages and focuses on the history of a particular type of machine.

Has any one else seen this behavior?

This seems to me to be a game changer unless I am missing something.

I will be happy to PM moderators the site if you wish
cheers

[goodroi]

Did you check to see if there are any 301 redirects?

[Kristos]

I did change my user agent so the site would see googlebot, but I have no other method of seeing the .htaccess file.

[bakedjake]

Does it rank for anything?

If not, who cares?

[Kristos]

They Rank #2, #3, #4 just under their wikipedia.
Their title tag is their URL, no text

[Kristos]

OMG!
I checked the wikipedia page (1 for their term)
The wiki page is a PR4
it has a NOFOLLOW link to this site!
anyone?

[bakedjake]

It's probably a redirect from another domain or something like goodroi said.

[Kristos]

but doesn't wikipedia only link to authority sites on a specific subject?
makes no sense to me

if it was doing a redirect only for googlebot, would I see it when I changed my user agent to googlebot?

[bakedjake]

No, the other way. Another domain is redirecting to it.

[Kristos]

with NO IBL's at all, I would have no way of checking that....
It's just first time i've seen such a thing and I started this in 1999 back when AltaVista was the big dog on the block :)

[Philosopher]

A redirect won't always show in a backlink search even though they do transfer PR. That is almost certainly what it is.

So somewhere out there are sites linking to a specific domain or a page on a domain, but the URL being linked to is redirecting to the domain you are seeing.

[bakedjake]

IBLs -> old domain -> 301 redirect -> new domain you're asking about

Link data for the old domain will usually show up on the new domain but may not have caught up yet.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I can buy PR5 dropped domains right now and, at least until the next toolbar update, make em look like real PR5 sites.

I can redirect and buy links to a site and, if timed luckily, get the PR to jump and then shut off the redirects and stop paying for the links.

In other words toolbar PR is a snapshot in time, not the current PR. Don't trust it.

[Kristos]

thanks for the great answers folks!