I think you have a good point about the site structure and content. I have been trying to advise clients for a long time that their internal linking patterns are crucial to their rankings and success. I can understand the university domains holding the weight they do, it is the same with the .gov domains, unfortunately you can’t get a link from these type of domains unless you know the right people, money doesn’t talk with these type of links.

No links? That is strange, I don’t buy the domain age theory but I do believe in a link age theory, meaning ranking can depend on the age of your links, however it is pretty much the same thing. This is why I like to build links to a domain for three months before doing SEO copywriting.

I think the issue I had with this site was simply the fact that most of it’s link juice came from internal links around 76% if I remember correctly. I think the reason it was ranking so high was down to brand, but at the end of the day 98% of people searching this term are looking for search engine optimisation advice, so to this site, in my opinion, is an irrelevant result.

I would need to look into it to get a better idea of what going on, I am more than happy to do so if you send my the url’s of the sites in question. Sometimes even though a site may only have 6 links, they may be packed with authority and have been in place a long time, link age is an important ranking factor and thats why many sites struggle to rank quickly.

That would make an interesting case study, there are different ranking factors but your links are obviously some of the strongest. Do they have a lot of indexable content? This is something Google puts a little weight on, also look at how the domain as a whole is linked to as Google uses domain authority or popularity to rank pages now.