An SEO puzzle - bizarrely high result

[SEOChap]

I have been doing SEO for many a year but for the last couple of years, one particular page has been completely baffling me. Of all the SEO that I do, this page has grown to niggle at me more and more. I have a feeling that if I understood it, I would have a valuable insight into how Google works these days.

Currently ranking 2nd for "widgets in a row" is a good company and nothing wrong with them. But they do not sell "widgets in a row", the phrase is not in the text on the page at all and the only reference is a link at the bottom of the page that self-references the page itself.

Can anyone explain why it has consistently ranked so highly for this phrase over the last 2 years?

[edited by: goodroi at 4:38 pm (utc) on Nov 7, 2011]
[edit reason] Please no specific keywords or websites [/edit]

[goodroi]

1st - Anchor text is important.
2nd - Having synonyms on the page can also help.
3rd - Having over a hundred internal links can help alot for long tail keywords.

Don't forget that 301 redirects can help to hide the inbound link popularity which can make a page rank well. There are some other ways you can make a page rank without being very obvious.

[SEOChap]

Thanks - interesting thoughts. It doesn't seem to be the 3rd option. I'm not sure how synonyms work. I know anchor text is important but a link: search shows no results except for the page itself. An exact phrase search for the url (i.e. in quotes) might find some other hidden links but finds nothing.

I suppose I suspect that their SEO person might be up to something dodgy but cannot see how I can investigate that theory further.

[atlrus]

It's a lottery. No, seriously, it's a lottery.
I have a page from one of my websites that ranks in the top 10 for "widget", a keyword with bazilion results returned. Yet there is almost nothing on that page itself, never done much optimization, compared to the rest of the website, yet that page is still ranked high, even after Panda wiped out the rest of that website back to the 200+ results :)

[SEOChap]

Yes, I've been negatively impacted by Panda too. I also concur with your opinion that the Google search results increasingly seem to produce spurious results like this one. Weirdodd.