About 6 months ago mcp.com started ranking on page 1 for the term "yellow pages". They are still there today, and bounce around as Google shifts the position of this ... umm... wormhole position.
SEOmoz pointed out a similar instance in position 4 this week.
I'm commenting on that thread over there, and here is what I wrote (to save some time)...
I'm finding these more and more over the past few weeks, and appear to be caused by "wormhole" links... which is the term we use for old, trusted backlinks. Unfortunately, as you have mentioned, the content on the target domain isn't always valid (or active).
It started about... hmmm... 6 months ago, and some of those errors still exist today for valuable keyword terms. Do a search for "yellow pages", and you will find mcp.com still floating around -- even though they are completely invalid. The domain used to be owned by the publisher of the Internet Yellow Pages... and that is enough to rank the domain today, even though DNS changed hands, and the site is completely invalid for the term.
Last week I found a geocities cite that also didn't resolve properly -- and ranking for a very nice term. This time there were only 10 backlinks reported by google -- but all very old, and from trusted sources.
Lesson learned... place your links now, they will start working 5 years from now. ;) Oh -- or buy those websites with wormhole links and 301 them to do your bidding.
