This is a mystery

[Zapruder]

Hi All
I do SEO in a very competitive industry, which is heavily populated with SEO "experts" - people who appear to know all the correct (and incorrect) methods, and who seem to do a good job.
I have been doing this for a few years and I think I have a pretty good understanding of all the correct techniques (helped in no small part by this forum - thanks!), and my own sites have always performed well.

BUT... I'm starting to think that there's a huge gap in my knowledge - a blind spot somewhere:

yesterday I did a search on Google on one of my main keywords and discovered that the #1 ranked site does not contain a single instance of that keyword anywhere in the source code.

My question is - how can a site be ranked #1 on a keyword that it does not have anywhere, be that in the tags, URL, content etc?

My only explanation for this is that it must have a lot of other sites linking to it which have the keyword in the anchor text.

Can anyone tell me what I'm missing?

Thanks

[Dayo_UK]

Yes, your own explanation is correct.

IHMO, Anchor text seems to be more important than ever on Google at the moment - if you look at the Google cache it will probably say that the text only appears on links pointing to the site.

[ukgimp]

redirect?
cloaking?

Check the google cache, failing that look for other caches. You may get lucky and find out what it going on.

[Zapruder]

Thanks.
Interestingly, there is no "cache" link for its listing.

All the top 10 sites on the SERP are displayed in the usual way:
----------------------
Title
Keyword context copy
URL
Cached - Similar pages
----------------------

This one has:
--------------------
Title
Keyword context copy
Description:
Category:
URL
Similar pages
--------------------

The keyword context copy contains the keywords, but this copy does not appear on the actual page. This does seem to point to some sort of cloaking or redirect.

Clicking on the "Category" link in the SERP goes to the Google directory.

Could it be that Google gives preference to a site that is in its directory, regardless of its keyword relevance vs the other results?

This site does not have a higher page ranking than the other sites in the directory, however.

[seo_sherpa]

Zapruder,

You are reeling from the impact of anchor text. I just optimized a site for certain keywords without actualy incorporating the keywords on the page.

I ended up0 creating around 60 incoming links with the same anchor text.
Lo & behold the site was number 1 for that kerphrase.

Then I tweaked the metas a little & the site started to come up for other related keywords as well.

Fore example: liknked with widgets as anchor text. It started to peak on that.
Then added blue green etc in the mets & the site started to do well(first page rankings) for blue widgets, green widgets

Thats probably what is happening in your case.

Check their backlinks & see the anchor tags.

[Zapruder]

Thanks seo_sherpa. Makes good sense. Is that exclusively incoming links from other sites or do links from within the same site to the home page also count?