No content, good position in Google

No apparent reason for competitors good rankings in Google

[Jabzebedwa]

Hello,
I am baffled as can be by the fourth ranked site in Google for a particular search term.

Using a keyword density search, I enter my search term, and the above mentioned URL. There are no occurences of the search term on the page and there are no backward links. The page is redirected from another page which appears to have no readable content.

This flies in the face of so many principles, as I understand them, of optimizing a page for Google. It re-directs from one no-content page, to another that has no mention of the keyword.

My page, which is a straight forward HTML page, with just the right dusting of the keyword and content and some backward links, is not to be found in Google.

Any thoughts?

Jabzebedwa

[NovaW]

The only answer is probably that this will be fixed in the next update. I've seen the same thing. 1 page site with PR1 No#1 in the SERPS for a search with 3million results.

[Eleveeze Preslee]

yep, i see this a lot. I know a lot of people are saying that the average joe bloggs still thinks he is getting a good serps but its sad how far google has fallen with this update. content seems to count for nothing though im sure it does, but how they score it is a mystery when so many sites with no content are making good positions for competitive terms. lets hope this really is just an interim point in the move to a new system/technology for google. for the first time in years im having to use other engines after not gteting decent results for stuff i was searching for myself. Respect to googleguy for giving as much information as he does, but its strange that he seems quite happy with things, and tells us how few complaints they have had when its so obvious google is currently returning poor results.

[annej]

This has been going on forever. Some sites stay near the top update after update and you just can't imagine why they are there. One of those Google mysteries. (sigh)

[Tony_Perry]

this is usually down to having lots of high quality backward links and a good title, keywords used in structure of site etc. in googles favour i would say that these sites usually deliver what the user was searching for!

[NovaW]

this is usually down to having lots of high quality backward links

PR1? - one can only guess that the PR would be higher but it had some penalty - it has a bucket load of "quality" guestbook backlinks. No matter - it's #1 - I'm sure they are popping champaign corks.

[darkroom]

I know of about 20 different sites in my field of interest all using encode/decode stuff and all they display is an image of one of their domains. No text at all. But when googlebot looks at it, it only sees text and text. Text to get high SERP's. This is one of the biggest scam i have seen. Google did take action on one of this site a little while ago, but with the new update, it got included again. I am hoping it will dissapear once the spam filter is applied. But they won't have much affect since they probably have like 20-100 domains doing the same stuff.
Anybody interested in looking at what they are doing?
Its quite simple but neat. obviously against the google guidelines though.

[Eleveeze Preslee]

>Anybody interested in looking at what they are doing?<

can u sticky me that url?

[heini]

Folks, it's obvious that Google has rolled out a product which is halfbaked in many aspects. We all know that, there have been hundreds if not thousands of messages describing the problem.

Lets not get into the old "I found this spam and..." game again. Second, if you want exchange stuff privately, do so. But "sticky me" posts are really tiresome... :)