a no-content brand new blog selling ebooks gets between oprah and dr phil for the search term "relationship advice" ??? ok whats the secret http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...hs=siw&q=relationship+advice&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10
www.relationshipheadquarters.com is 2nd and has about 2000 backlinks www.relationshipgold.com is 3rd and has about 770 backlinks. Use www.backlinkwatch.com to see those backlinks and the Anchor Text that those links use. Oprah's site, for example, has less than 400 backlinks and the majority don't use Anchor Text on the links.
Studied all the backlinks for those high ranking pages VERY carefully, and every one of them that has a lot of backlinks (outside of makeupalley, which seems to be organic), has 80-90% of those links coming from the same 3-4 blogs, owned by admins/employees/contributors of the main site searched. Basically, they all buy a few sites, build a few of them up, and keep referring to the other sites on those new sites DAILY, over and over, and after a couple of years, you have thousands upon thousands of them. NONE of the backlinks on those sites stem from high ranking sites. They're all from the same few sites, again, headed by the same admins/owners, and none of those (referring) sites are especially busy or content-rich (this applies to purseforum, too, btw). Except... and this is really interesting because it's OBVIOUSLY a trick of some kind, and I'd love to know how it works: Go to backlinkwatch.com, and type in "http://www.thatsfit.com" (it's a woman's shape-type site that always ranks high). It shows their total backlinks as 7,199,148 -- more than makeupalley, which isn't physically possible! Then look at referring sites. Almost all of the ones shown are coming from engadget.com, COMPLETELY unrelated pages where those links/anchor text is NO WHERE to be found. Not even close. It seems as though it's hidden somehow on that page. Don't know, but it's obviously a trick.
Thatsfit.com is owned by AOL and yes it's linked from Endgadget and many other sitewide links from authority sites in the AOL and Weblogsinc network. Also Thatsfit.com syndicates a lot of content, so a lot of blogs that may be referring to that site are probably scraper sites just publishing it's content.
EXACTLY! The anchor text that supposedly are there according to backlinkchecker tools are actually NOT on the page at all. They dont exist! also isnt the first example I cited "crosslinking" and doesnt google penalize for this?
What is happening is huge companies that are essentially white listed by Google are gaming the system. If you think Organic Search results are truly Organic then you need to learn something about Internet Marketing and that's this - money buys rank PERIOD. You can rank for low volume low traffic long tail keywords with backlinks. But step into the world of real competition and the Rank is purchased. A very long time ago - years ago I started seeing sites linked from O'Reilly publishing (Whitelisted by Google) ranking very high. Sites that didn't have tons of links. Sites that were not that great. Then I started reverse engineering things. And like you I found all kinds of sites ranking without logic... conventional logic to back it up. Google will play along with any scheme as long as it makes them money. They feed off of Corporate America. If you remember the BMW Germany/Google case you probably know the power and influence of large Corporations on Google. Google pretended to be pissed off... but it was just a show. Look at Amazon... a lot of their links are crap yet they rank near the top... not because of quality content because of Whitelisted Authority. Same with newspapers... etc. And if Corporate America wants to rank you lose. All they have to do is drop money to buy the "Organic Rank". They outsource to companies to buy them links. But what can you do?