How have they done that? DA20 site in p2 for very competitive search term

[FDFPres]

Not sure whether to actually name the term and site in question, but basically it is a very big term for a popular type of home furniture.

Since the algo change, there is a site thats appeared in p2, right behind the market leader in google uk.  The site has a domain authority of 20, and only 84 links - none of which even have the anchor text in question, and infact well over 90% have the same anchor text which is related but different to the search term.

The search term appears on the home page 3 times - once in a 120 character+ keyword stuffed home link title, once in a 100 character+ keyword stuffed h1 tag that isnt even visible on the home page and one in a paragraph that is visible.
The site is badly made and buggy, but its outranking John Lewis, Dunelm Mill etc - very big players in the UK market.

How on earth does that work? They are doing so much google tells you not to and winning big rank!? What is Google doing?

[TomRayner]

Hey there

Without knowing the keyword or the website, I can't give you a definitive answer.

But it may be a case that Open Site Explorer has not detected all of the new links yet - OSE updates roughly bi-weekly, and it takes a little longer for those discovered links to make their way into the index.

So you might be able to get the info soon.  If you have access to MajesticSEO or Ahrefs - you'll probably be able to see the information now, as they update their indexes hourly.

[FDFPres]

just checked ahrefs - and as usual it shows more links than OSE, but a rapid recent decline and same story - no anchor text matching the search term.

Ok, ill give it up - search term is 'X!X!X!X!' and the site is X!X!X!X!X! (removed)

[Everett]

First, it looks like Google is considering "oak furniture" synonymous with "oak beds" since they are bolding the word "furniture" even though i searched for "oak beds". This is pretty common, but that would answer your questions about anchor text and keyword use.

I see the H1 tag on the page. It isn't too terribly keyword stuffed compared to a lot of sites out there. It isn't hidden. As you can see, Google crawls that bit of text just fine:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Xim_4vDniwMJ:www.oakfurniturewarehouse.co.uk/+oak+beds&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

I agree that their link profile does not seem good enough to merit the #2 position for such a competitive phrase, but links are not the only thing that matter. Searching on the Google.co.uk site means their ccTLD is going to help them over John Lewis and Dunelm Mill for that particular ranking factor. They may have really good user experience metrics, which we can't really tell much about. Above all, the site is very relevant since it has "oak furniture" in the domain and is specific to "oak" furniture, whereas some of the other sites sell lots of other types of furniture. I notice the #1 site is also oak-specific, has oak furniture in the domain, and is on a .co.uk ccTLD.

The truth is there is no way of knowing what exactly they are doing to rank above another site since there are so many variables, both known and unknown. However, from what I could see there isn't anything overtly spammy or blackhat going on, and the fact that they rank well for that phrase is certainly not outside of the realm of possibility.

[FDFPres]

sorry you're absolutely right that h1 is visible.  looks stuffed to me though!