#2 site in G's SERPs is a nothing site

[Kristos]

I am looking to get some widgets printed.
so I googled widgets printing
the #2 site is an under construction page with, with other than the statement, "we still working on it" has nothing but google ads on it.
It has no inbound links AT ALL.
How in the world is this possible?
(starting to think about Bing more now)

[edited by: goodroi at 6:23 pm (utc) on Sep 18, 2012]
[edit reason] Widgetized [/edit]

[goodroi]

Did you check to see if it has a cached page? It is possible that site had content the last time it was crawled. But if I had to guess this site probably has alot of links that you haven't discovered. Did you check to see if there are any 301 redirects pointing to the site?

[Kristos]

yes the cache is there.
same one liner with one very interesting exception.
instead of a header with www.domain.com
it now says webcache.googleusercontent.com

is this black hat?

[Kristos]

not sure how to check for 301's
BUT, I use a thumbnail shot add-on for search in firefox and it DOES show something completely different

[JohnNZ]

Regardless of backlinks, does the page really deserve to be #2?

I've seen a lot of this recently, when searching i.e. being an average user and not a webmaster checking my own keywords. Frustrating to say the least, as a user.

[tedster]

I see this kind of poor result from time to time - it usually doesn't last long. Poor specific results have been around since Google's beginning and really, since the beginning of online search. However, it does sound like this particular search phrase is one we might expect to be better than this.

With the amount of information that is online today, plus the complexity of factors Google is trying to fold together, I've become kind of numb to these errors - unless of course they start showing up as a pattern across many different searches. Then there is sometimes a clue to how things are working behind the scenes.

[JohnNZ]

I appreciate the algo doesn't always get it right but shouldn't have this page got caught out by 'thin content' and 'heavy ads'?

May be I'm over-simplifying the algo ....

[levo]

Maybe the algo is trying to learn what users would do if it shows the worst result(s). (Checks the preview and moves on/visits site, hits the back button and clicks the next one/clicks on the ads...)

[Kristos]

you know they say in some ares.."if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes and it will change"?
well, the crap site I mentioned is gone from the serps entirely.