Why does it rank so well????

With regard to SEO, I am not a complete newbie, but I am a bit puzzled by this one...

If you do a google search on "Graphic Design Sydney" the 3rd company that comes up is "eye scre@m design", ...I 'm a bit puzzled why this site ranks so well for a number of reasons...

1. there is no real content on the page as it is just a redirect page
2. when I did a google "links:" back link search there were 0
3. When I did a google "Site:" search there were 16 pages that were broken links
4. It's Google page rank is 0
5. There is only one image with an ALT tag
6. this is not a recent change this page has ranked well for the past 2 years.

...I look fwd to everyones thoughts, as it seems to go against the results I would expect it to get.

b//c it has a few strong relevant links and believe it or not decent on page seo.

Sorry 1fast72nova, would you mind elaborating, by what you mean by decent on page seo? Also if the strong link you are referring to is Precept, then shouldn't that rank higher on the initial search? ...Thanks heaps for your response!

Though recommended but not mandatory for ranks. If you can drive links without content then you can rank at # 1 as well.


Google doesn't show the links. In fact there are some links from the Yahoo Dir and other authority sites pointing to the domain.

Take this one for example

http://www.braindonors.org/links.html




Doesn't matter...the owner just wants to rank the homepage. Also those links will be removed from Google's index anyways.



I see PR 3



Doesn't matter.



Yups, the links are holding its rank.

When there is little content on a page google seems to rely more so on the alt tags, as it should for sites that are image based rather than text based.
For example I made a site for a guy who only wanted to target his local auto repair market. In doing this he offered a service on the site, the url looked like services.php?a=keywordbrand

so on the page there is only an image with alt tag and one link to itself with keyword brand as the text. This page ranks on the first page for keyword refills (#6 according the G's webmaster tools), keep in mind this isn't a very competitive term with only 120,000 results but the page has zero offsite backlinks, it appeared in less than a month and the site has had only directory submission done with zero attention to the keyword whatsoever (the site does rank first for about 5 local terms he asked for).

The site in question, there is no doubt from the source they are targeting sydney, graphics and design with little else on the page to compete with it works. No doubt if that page were to add a lot of content unrelated it would most likely suffer.

You are missing some important ranking factors here:
1. The site uses exact keywords in title tag: Graphic Design sydney.
2. I check their backlinks and there are link with anchor text "Graphic design sydney" using http://www.backlinkwatch.com
3. There are semantic words in the content such as "For graphic design and branding in Sydney visit our new website:"
Google understand their site is very relevant for the targeted term.
4. It is using .au extension, so it is relevant to sydney australia.

Though weak in content, but passes the requisite for rankings.