Are You Looking for New Shoes?

Whenever I look at my shoes, I'm thinking of when I'm actually going to buy a new pair. The shoes I'm wearing right now are pretty beat up. They're so beat up that you wouldn't want to see a picture of it here. Okay, to give you a little teaser, you can talk to my shoes.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to talk about shoes is not totally about shoes. Well, in a sense, it could be about shoes since I am looking for a new pair. This is about what you can see when you search for "new shoes" on Google. You know what I wanted to see? I'd love to see some online stores that have galleries of awesome shoes. It would be awesome if I could have some sort of a Green Lantern motif, just like the one in the picture below. But I guess I didn't get that result.

I'm pretty sure you'd want these when you're looking for 'em on Google

[img c/o http://www.radii24th.us/]

Before I decided to look for new shoes through Google, I was browsing through some forums, then I saw someone talking about the search results for "new shoes". Talk about coincidence. They said they were pretty amazed at what they saw. It wasn't a website full of new shoes in it; if you're not going to count the ads and the video suggestions, you will see this...

Who would have thought that a website shares something about marketing lessons using an athletic shoe company that operates in a home as a business model? I didn't. I actually expected Nike's site to be on top. Well, either them, or it's Adidas. When I saw this result, I wondered what kind of link building and optimization did these guys do to be able to reach that spot in the search results. I ran a test using the ahrefs Site Explorer, and found out that they only had just a little over 200 backlinks. The percent of dofollow links that they have were 98% of those 200. Talk about wanting to get some link juice.

Anyway, I know that the results would differ based on certain factors like IP address and location. Thanks to logic_earth from the Site Point Forums for pointing that out, by the way. What are your thoughts on this one? How did this marketing education website reach the top result for "new shoes" (without the quotes) when they're not completely talking about shoes?