Has Panda help this site achieve great heights? How? and Why?

[ShoutChris]

Today I went about my business in trying to understand what is happening in our market, eyewear, after the last Panda update.  I was interested to know if any of our competitors were effected as much as we were for a very competitive key phrase To my surprise a new kid appeared on the block, well, on page one, position two.  Imagine my second surprise, when the new kid turn out to be a 3 month old domain, yes 3 months, with zero page rank and zero back links.  I was in for one more surprise before I stood up, walked to the window and gazed into space to contenplate the meaning of Panda and SEO as we know it. This third surprise was the site in question is a counterfeiting site using black hat SEO with fast results. It has a Blog its a good looking site with the key phrase menstioned a hundred times.

google-UK-%20Search-Result.jpg panda-help.jpg

[donford]

Hi Chris I've witnessed the same thing in a couple other markets. Likely, their results are due to an aggressive link strategy that will ultimately bite them in the A**. The two sites I noticed this from held their spots for 1 week and the other 2 1/2 weeks, after which they disappeared from the first 2 pages.

One of them is one we track here at SEOMoz.org I included is an image of when we noticed this site rank very high, over-layed on their links over time graph.

rank_spike_links.png

[ShoutChris]

Hi Journeyman

Thanks for replying,  What I don't understand is how this still can happen? my understanding of the Panda updates are:

1. sites with better content will rank higher, more social, reviews, video etc.

2. Panda understands what it is reading grammar, context and so on.

3. what about page rank, back links?

I'm really confused I tried creating content and forget about SEO and just create for users, after 18 months no PageRank and only a couple of links which are natural. I have see a 60% drop in traffic and about the same in sales for the mentioned key phrase.

But here is a site which is able to high jack page one in an industry that is worth 100 billion with a key phrase which has 360K searches a month.

BTW I reported the site to our friends at Google.  No response  as yet.

[donford]

Hi Chris,

Out of curiosity how long has this site been ranking high?

[ShoutChris]

Hi

First became aware of it on Wednesday of last week.  Is there a way of tracking it?

[donford]

HI Chris

There is a way to track it, checkout the campaigns in Campaign section. You can add 3 of your competitors there and set up the keywords you want to watch. Unfortunately, the there is no great way to go back in time, but by tracking them now you can get a feel for what happens over upcoming weeks.

[ShoutChris]

Thank you for your reply.

I reported the site to google and now the have slipped to number 6th but I fear that the will be back with another site soon.

Regards

Chris