[AnaB]

Great piece John. And, you're absolutely correct. I was looking at a couple mini sites last night ( a page or two) and trying to reverse engineer their SEO. One of them was particularly interesting because I know the owner..

So, particular site that I cannot name, ranks number 2 after a wiki article for a term with a couple million results. Is in a domain that's not even it's own. Hasn't been updated for YEARs. (other competing sites are as old or older than this one in the first page so age isn't really the biggie) Half the content is duplicate (really, copied and pasted from the vendors website. This person is an affiliate for the product), yet ranks number two. Generates great profit. The domain and the site are no way related. it's like putting golf lessons in a speak spanish website. The owner hasn't looked at this site for atleast a year..Puts a lot of the popular seo beliefs into question. The only thing to really say is that the main domain is Strong.

Quite fascinating to say the least.

Best,

Ana