Google and Yahoo without submission

friend's site shows up no.3 without any submission

[TomJones]

I've been learning all that I can about SEs from this site. I now show up in Cnet (search.com) 2nd. I don't really know how since, I didn't submit to them. No luck with any majors, yet.

The thing is, my friend manages a singer that has just began to 'break.' He has a basic website that went up a little over a month ago. His site is showing up 3rd on Google and Yahoo. He hasn't done any submitting of any sort. My site is no where to be found in either. Any obvious reasons for this? Thanks!

[EliteWeb]

Its not unusual to be loved by the google bot...
its not unusual to show up at that high spot...
When your sites linked from any other site, the bots will crawl it and index you . do de do de do.

[TomJones]

That was kinda my point. His site is so basic (no links or optimizing of tags) and very new so, the Bots should not even be aware of its existence. I think I may have figured out the reason, though. The artist was on the TODAY show's "American Idol"-like contest. If his site was linked from the NBC site, the bots probably found it that way. He's received about 200,000 hits on his site so, people are definitely making their way to it. Just kinda frustrating seeing him pop #3 with no effort, when I'm doing all this tweaking. Oh well, whattayagonnado?

[Robert Charlton]

He got into Google (and thus Yahoo web search) because someone linked to him. That's all it takes. It's probably not a competitive search area yet, and the NBC site would have been an instant jolt to get him in quickly.

Try these commands (in the search box) to see who's linking to the site:

Google:
link:www.domain.com

AllTheWeb:
link.all:www.domain.com

The backlinks take a while to show up, though... for Google the next major update after a full crawl... alltheweb, whenever.