I mean he's the No. 1 for my keyword, his position is very strong (he only has an affiliate promoting website, and neighter the original website, which only comes second, nor the Google Dance could shake him down), but - and now comes the interesting part - he has no incoming links (as displayed on Yahoo Site Explorer, not Google Links). So do you have any idea how come a page like that is the No. 1?
Sorry, I can't give you the keyword, but it's adult business, and it has 1.440.000 competitve pages indexed for.
No incoming links but number 1 in your target KW? What KW are you targeting and what is your website? Let us check.
It's very hard to tell how anyone's getting a No1 position by knowing the keyword.. and you want to know that without saying the keyword
There is more to it then just a "keyword". You are looking at the fine line details, not the big picture. What did this other guy use to build his website with? Is it better optimized for search engines then your site? Is the word in the domain name, site description or site title? Has this other person posted a lot of articles with the keyword in it, and are the articles optimized for search engines? Did the other guy use a high quality commercial CMS, and you are trying to use some cheap or free cms that is not search engine optimized? As an example, one of my sites is beating out larger sites because my site description and meta description have been optimized for certain keywords. Instead of asking how this guy got the ranking he did, ask how you can beat his rank. But you have to look at the BIG picture and you are focused on a single "keyword". Broaden your scope and your view point. Maybe a question you should ask is "how can I optimize my site to get better ranking?"
Why start a thread asking "what this guy could be doing?!" and then hoping to gain a response/insight without letting people know the keyword so they can look into it for you? OoooooOo SECRET keyword lol Have you checked if his on-page is flawless compared to competitors including yourself having useless structure? Competitor 2 could have thousands of irrelevant backlinks with no/irrelevant anchor text, crappy on-page, etc.
~kev~ his competitor has 0 backlinks, so posting articles with anchor text is a no go, it would show up in yahoo explorer linkdomain. however, i don't agree with your advice on just using the description meta tag will provide ranking benefits like your own site - he should be looking at title, h1, unique content etc etc and quality backlinks with anchor text of that "infamous" keyword.
probably has a farm of splogs, with robots.txt disallowing yahoo, or meta tags "noindex, follow" seen that a few times recently, people try to cover their tracks by keeping yahoo out.
Look at the h1,h2,keywords,title,description, and alt tags. Look at the structure. Run a program like SEO Elite on it and find out.
That means he got internal secret PageRank 11 and "sticky No 1 site position". Quite expensive, this guy bought new Ferrari for Matt Cutts + lifetime free fuel. Position will remain unchanged until Cuil beats Google.