I think the safest way to rank #1 these days is to focus on providing something quality, whether it's content or a product. It's to easy for Google to notice unnatural patterns on your website, you will get penalized.
My quick opinion is that you over optimized the main site while by not paying attention to the secondary site, it was given the chance to grow organic With the Penguin updates your link profile looking natural is even more important. In the past, we acquire links with specific anchor text and now Google is taking a second look at that and saying...hmmm a site with an overwhelming majority of specific anchor text is not natural. Most people link with click here, or check this out, or they use the url.
where it is No. 1 ? on Google.com ? any other country specific ? if you got no.1 not only single reason, just because keyword= domain name Good quality of content as well, various good amount of quality back links and recourse your plenty efforts and passions working being today's result.
There might be several reason to get your site on #1 Keyword in the domain name the content is unique and most relevant to the targeted keyword quality backlinks frequent updates of the content. Anyways, happy to know that your site is on #1 and I would suggest you to work on the content more and get more quality back links so that it will stick in that position for long time... All the best
I agree with guy above me also. I have a crap site with no content really but I bought domain on a decent sized search query and it is number one in that search. When I open a new site I actually look for searches with high traffic or the traffic Im targeting and buy that domain name if available in a .com.
Low bounce rate is the correct answer you are looking for. Most probably it has a link to the main site and you designed it to make the visitors have nothing to do other than clicking on the link. Those clicks must have been keeping its bounce rate about 50%. It will be the #1 search result for its keywords as long as it has the best bounce rate.
- keywords used in your website domain name - it's temporary effect of search engines - there might have low competition on keywords - your site is relatively old, so it might have great back-links you should devote some time to manage current raking by performing qualitative link building activities.
If you are building too many backlinks then it may cause, try to build natural links, content is very important these days.