Originally Posted by jetjet

off topic a bit, but interesting to me as an exercise

I did a search on the word "ICE", which is a common word that one would expect might bring up results on frozen water perhaps, or perhaps not

anyways, the sponsored link that came up was for ice . com (whom I remember reading about as being a company with a 7 figure advertising budget with google)

ranking pretty high for the keyword ICE was ice . com, they ranked higher than ice . org ... but seeing those two right near the top made one think that domain name itself must have a big ranking bonus, but maybe not

the meta title for ice . com had no mention of the word ICE

looking at the backlinks to ice . com I found very few external links using the keyword ICE (the only ones I found were using the whole domain name)

so I am really curious how this site which is a jewelry site that has very little keyword saturation for the word ICE ranks right at the top for that keyword

does a 7 figure budget help in the SE rankings? or is the domain name alone worth a huge ranking bonus?

any of you SEO gurus explain what I am missing in my understanding of this ranking success story?