How this site is ranked so high in SERP's with no content?

Question

In last few months whenever i search for computer wallpapers (using various keywords), somewhere between 1st and 5th position is always site http://hdw.eweb4.com

Everything on that site is scraped from other wallpaper sites and all it do, is to link to external resources (wallpapers).

Question: Why Google rank it so high when there is no real/unique content on it?

Answer 1

Enter that website's url into www.opensiteexplorer.org (or any other backlink checker) and you'll see it has lots of backlinks from a variety of domains.

You can further use other toolboxes (sistrix, searchmetrics, xovi, seolytics...) to analyze the value of the site over a period of time to see if there was a sudden spike of links or if the link building was constant.

A site can be of value to others even if it has no unique content and is just curating. If a site's rank will last long if it solely depends on backlinks is another question!

Answer 2

Following might be the reasons for this site showing higher in search results:

1) This site may be getting lot of back-links from other sites.

2) As per the recent Google Panda update, if one site is linking to another sites, which can be useful for the viewers, then Google happens to give edge to that very site ( In this case it is there).

3) Last but the most important factor.

Google shows personalized search result ie, if you have surfed/visited the site previously also and downloaded some image from the very site, which means you have performed "CALL TO ACTION".

As you have performed Call To Action on the site.

Google takes the site as 'familiar to you' and shows the site as your personalized search result. Other people may not see the site on same position as you are seeing it for a particular keyword, all because of "personalized search result" theory.

To see the de-personalized search result use the following: http://www.google.com/search?&q=wallpaper&pws=0

replace &q=wallpaper with &q="your keyword"