It's a combination of factors ranking this forum: it's been indexed for years, the IBLs are old and there is steady growth. The incoming backlinks are also natural. People link from their blogs, sites and forums to topic related stuff. Once a site has a lot of credibility, it doesn't even need incoming links from other sites to rank an individual page. There is so much internal power, you pretty much just have to create a thread and that's it. Having said it, let's see if we can rank this thing for Mike
Interesting idea, but could you name me at least one .edu site that accepts business related articles?
Search Google for your area of expertise, add .edu into the search box, contact the individuals publishing articles.
Offer a free web counter I think you will find that along with great content attracting links... Shawns free web counter that includes a link to whatever Shawn is toying with lately included with it is where a lot of the links come from.
On the original question, here are some reasons why DP threads rank well: * old, well established site * lots of backlinks (and consequently PR) * backlinks from authority sites * well seo'd forum archive * constantly crawled by SE spiders as new content is constantly being added (especially in the forums) * content is unique
I just found out on of my pages is linked from http://www.loc.gov/ that has to be worth something even in an internal page?
http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/hispanic/haiti/resources/haiti-history.html too bad my page already had a PR5