A challenge: Why is this site ranking so highly?

Hi all,

I am trying to figure out why this site irelandmortgageonline. com is ranking so highly for the phrase "mortgage ireland". Against very strong competition it is at number 3 on Google.ie with a PR of just 2 and no SEO.

Is this black hat or am I missing something? All of the competition (that it is beating) have higher PR's and are properly optimized.

Any thoughts? What's their trick?!

Mike.

Oh now come on. Surely someone on this board must have some ideas!

sure it's optimized

google.ie result is

Mortgage Ireland
Information on independent advisors on all types of mortgages.
www.irelandmortgageonline.com/ - 11k - Cached - Similar pages


Its' in the title, domain name and on the page. This just goes to show that you do not need any neta tags at all. Google is a proximity engine, the words just need to be near each other on the page.

No secret, no black hat, no trick. Just a very well optimized page.

[ Message was edited by: mj1256 04/05/2008 03:28 am ]

The problem with analysing third party pages is that we can see the on-page stuff, but cannot easily get the off-page stuff, or how they work together.

If it were YOUR site, I'd be asking all sorts of questions before I would draw any conclusions at all. And you can't answer for him.

So, without a lot of serious searching, I'd be guessing - and I'd rather not

you are absolutely right, and many times we worry too much about what others are doing. It really does not matter as they will do what they do and we cannot change that. What we should do is concentrate on our our site and what we can do to make it better.

Thanks guys, this is interesting feedback.

If anyone else has other comments please do continue the thread. The comments above are helpful.

In particular, I'm interested to know why it is ranking above PR3 and PR4 sites even though it is only PR2.

PR is only a very small factor in ranking, any tools you use to see the pr of a site shows an outdated pr, not the current pr

There was a time, when page rank was central toGoogle's future plans, that a pr2 page would never appear above a pr3 page.

But times change, and for most purposes, pr really isn't worth obsessing about. Specially on someone else's site!