How can this website rank so well?

StarBright01

Just looking for other people's thoughts on this. Came across a website ranking really well in position 7 in google.ie however they have a Domain Authority of just 8 and they seem to have very little backlinks. There isn't a whole lot of content either on the website. How can this be? Am I missing something?

Ronan_wals

Hard to tell without the URL & keyword they are ranking for

Digibeo

A new site could rank very easily for an extremely long tail keywords that no-one else is trying to rank for, or even only a few other weak competitors are ranking for. We would need to analyse the ranking site and also analyse the other sites ranking on the same page to give a proper answer, anything else is pure speculation.

utmbuilder

it's also quite possible to be hiding metrics such as backlinks from engines such as moz etc, common practice if a Private blog network or expired domains are in play

adamcally

Backlinks count doesn't mean you will rank well in SERPs. 10 High Authority publications are pretty far better than 100 of low backlinks.

brumaio

Maybe they are ranking for a long tail keyword with low competition?
Or maybe they do have backlinks but are hiding them (you can do that with the robots.txt file by blocking the most popular bots