Why does some sites rank with no seo

[CooperStrzelecki]

Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts?

I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site.

This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15

Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20

They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem.

I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!

[jpeg80]

Do they have a 301 redirect from an old site that has a more substantial backilink profile ?

Could you post the URLS of the both of the sites so we can have a deeper look

[CooperStrzelecki]

I will pm you the links now. I dont want to put the links out there.

[Maayboli]

How do you know their backlinks number is correct? If you are getting that from moz  (or some other tools) that number could be wrong and much smaller than the actual number is. Only Google knows the tru backlink number.

I manage a website which shows way less than number of backlinks in Moz than the actual links shown by google. I am suspecting same may be happening here.

[BlueCorona]

Hello Cooper!

I would say that domain age could really be impacting this, but that does seem a little unlikely to be the only reason why your website is performing poorly compared to this competitor. I recommend going through GSC to see if there are any messages or anything that indicates your website might have a penalty lingering somewhere.

If you want to share the links to the websites I would be happy to take a deeper look into the problem.