Yelp.com - How do they do this?

[h2oexpert]

Yelp.com seems to dominate a lot of search results for a lot of reasons.

Specifically, I've noticed that their internal search results URL appears in Google for tons of results like "hem jeans new york".  They dominate TONS of terms like this and it's always an internal search result page for yelp that appears in #1 Google.

From what I can tell, yelp.com is taking various keyword permutations from their internal search, combined with local city/zip info and creating such landing pages.

Here is a URL result for "hem jeans new york"

http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Hem+Jeans&find_loc=New+York%2C+NY

My question is this...What are the specific causes of their success on this type of local / long-tail / specific keyword strategy?  Is it...

1.  Using dynamic sitemaps to feed Google thousands of URLs with various keyword permutations attached.?

2.  Their domain reputation, inbound links, etc. etc.

3.  Both?  Something else?

Thanks for your feedback.

[AlanBleiweiss]

yes, part of it could be dynamic sitemaps, however consider these factors:

1.  According to their Moz ranking, Yelp has a Domain Authority of 93/100 - that's a lot of domain authority.

2. They've got over 16 million pages indexed at Google.

3. Of these, about 5 million are search results

4. Google claims to be able to explore forms - their bots are claimed to be able to simulate human behavior in form usage.

5. With about ten million pages indexed that are not yelp search results pages, that's an awful lot of raw data for Google's bots to experiment with in trying out that search for.