Sites with very few pages are ranking for some good keywords

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Francois-Pierre Marcil: There is no big secret. They probably worked hard online or offline and have been recognized as an authority for these words by users.
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  Steve Gerencser: Research scholarship links.
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  Asad Nadeem: I know a couple of more websites like 10beasts, they started ranking crazy just after few months. Believe me, content is pretty ordinary on those.
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  Saurav Sett: Tonmoy Parves I have seen this 10 beasts site`s link posted so many times in different groups with this story about ranking in a year, making money, scholarship links etc. I wonder how much of that story is true. But that story itself would be getting them backlinks all over the web and social media. I feel their genius is a PR victory where everyone reads a story about ranking fast, making money and shares it everywhere they can.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: If you want to get wild conjecture answers, or answers based on fairy dust or magic bullets, that`s all you`re going to get. If you seriously want to understand why certain sites rank, pay someone to properly audit them. Anything else is a wild guess. Most sites that rank when they have crappy content, do so because of toxic methods. If you want to emulate those toxic methods, just understand that Google is always working to destroy such sites. Sure, Google is TERRIBLE at that, even now going into 2018. However over the years they have wiped out millions of sites that used toxic methods. So it`s a blindfolded gamble to play that game.