How are these 2 sites with low stats and unoptimised title tags ranking so well ?

[leves]

Im doing some keyword research and Ive found 2 anomalies for competitive search terms where sites with unoptimised title tags, poor backlinks and other stats, (compared to the other sites listed in the SERP) are out ranking everyone and claiming the #1 spot

The 2 search terms are :
Interior designers London - #1 new-id.co.uk - OSE info
Interior designer London - #1 nstudio.co.uk - OSE info

(interestingly they hardly rank at all for any modification of those search terms)

The only thing i could think of is that they both had some really good links using that exact anchor text, but ive been checking OSE for the past month both in the backlinks and the just discovered but couldnt see anything like that.

I conducted the SERP checking from a laptop with a broadband connection based in London, although im not very local to either of these locations im about an 8th of the cities distance away from one of those location and about half a cities distance away from the other. So i dont think its a local skew thats causing the SERP rankings.

For both sites i can see they had old domains which now redirect to the them :

New-id.co.uk = newidinteriors.com
Nstudio.co.uk = intarya.com

Although the intarya domain was quite strong with good backlinks (but nothing above par comapred to the other sites the nstudio.co.uk site is now outranking, the anchor text was mostly natural with only some keyword anchor text from PA1 pages.

The newidinteriors.com didnt seem to have a backlink profile, both PA1 and DA1.

Any idea what's going on here ?

 

[bhartzer]

It looks like you're using the wrong tool to look at the link data for those sites. For New-id.co.uk I'm seeing a lot of on-topic backlinks from other sites. OSE isn't showing the full backlink data. Majestic is the one you'll want to see. Also, take a look at the anchor text of those links, as well.