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Some webmasters will kill for a top ranking. Others will get it when they least expect it. A WebmasterWorld member talks about how he's ranking above Amazon for his brand new site which has already been fully indexed. He wonders if this is a mistake, since he's doing so much better than the bigger competition.
That's a good question. There are a few factors that can influence high rankings. The obvious culprits include domain age (it may be a new site under his ownership, but was it a high-authority site under another's ownership?) and inbound links (if the content is good, you'll get good links, right?).
Then there's the other side of the coin. Perhaps the guy isn't ranking so well after all but his personalized results are showing up. Don't forget; you need to turn off personalized web search in order to see what the world is seeing. To do that, append &pws=0 to your search results like this (or log out of your Google account).
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
