Why is this site at no.1?

[emerald]

In the last 2 months, a previously unranked/unheard of website jumped straight to no.1 position for a particular keyword when searched from USA and is even ranking over many other big brands or stronger DA/PA sites.

I did notice some very strange JavaScript popup links that are heavily keyword linked from the first mention of the keyword on the page content. What are they trying to do here?

Otherwise they don't seem to have much PA/DA or seo going on.

Why are they doing so well?!

[KevinBudzynski]

It definitely does look "spammy/unnatural". What I mean is that it provides no useful content for visitors if it's hidden and looks like it's put there simply for the spiders.  So I would say it's spamming (even though some items are ok to use solely for the spiders).

In this case, I would say in the short-term probably does not yield any significant positive results and in the long-term it will actually hurt them.

[emerald]

Thanks for your ideas. 

What do you think about this keyword stuffed on-page hidden popup code they're using - could it be that it is helping them? 

There are over 20 of these with small variations repeated in the source code near the head. Is this not a kind of spamming?

div = document.createElement('div');
div.style.display = 'none';
div.style.position = 'absolute';
div.className = 'jsLinks';
div.id = 'jsLinks_travel to turkey';
div.onmouseout = function(ev) { jsHideDiv(ev, this); };
div.innerHTML = '<d< span="">iv class="jsWord">travel to turkey</d<>iv><d< span="">iv class="jsLink"> <a< span="">href="/travel-to-turkey/wedding-ideas/bodrum-hotels/destination-wedding/selected-venues-in-bodrum">Bodrum Hotels | Travel to Turkey | Travel to Bodrum| bodrum wedding | travel insurance|</a<> ></d<>iv><d< span="">iv class="jsLink"> <a< span="">href="/travel-to-turkey/turkey-tours/turkey-travel">Turkey Travel | Travel to Turkey | travel in turkey | turkey tours</a<>></d<>iv><d< span="">iv class="jsLink"> <a< span="">href="/travel-to-turkey/turkey-tours/travel-agent/why-choose-us">Travel to Turkey |Turkey Tours | travel agent | travel agencies</a<> ></d<>iv>';
document.body.appendChild(div);

[KevinBudzynski]

Typically a site that is previously unranked/unheard makes a sudden jump high in organics could be a number of reasons.

Two of these are:

1.) a high pagerank  (let say popular) site gave you an inbound link from a popular page

2,) or a naturally high ranking (typically after launch) from Google that drops rapidly (called a reverse sandbox - positive indexing for initial period)

In this case 2 month is a long time so I expect it is #1 (#2 should have worn off by now). After looking at their link profile, I could not say #1 is the reason either.

So emarald is probably right, good on-page seo took the site there...

[Branagan]

After a superficial look I couldn't see anything terribly wrong with it, it's just a bit over-optimized, but it has fare enough metrics, the keyword on the domain, a reasonable url structure and relevant content, so why shouldn't it rank well? It doesn't look like a highly competitive keyword combination. Also, if you say the site just jumped in, bare in mind that Google maybe testing it and it could go down soon enough.