How does someone rank a 1-2 page review site?I saw a website thats making Big $$$ Ranking #1

lets see if its top after todays penguin

That is an impressive backlinks profile
Hope you got the answer for your question

Start building backlinks.

build up an impressive backlink profile - like what he did

Most probably this is a churn & burn type of site with massive spam.

Such sites don't need to be large, 1 or 2 pages is enough to rank for a couple of weeks and if very lucky sometimes for a few months.

He might also have some redirects in place in addition to the spam.

Saying that a back link profile looks impressive by purely looking at the number of referring domains / subnets makes no sense at all. You can accomplish the same back link metrics with Scrapebox alone.

Homepage only but very in-depth which mean there is a 99% chance I will be able to see if there is a problem.

TO THE OP:

Thanks for PMing me the site. Here's what I found, I'll try to draw out as much angles as possible because there is no one-size-that-fits all approach. However, what we can draw out is what he is doing good which will allow you to be able to copy his approach AND THEN improvise on that in order to take over his position.

Website: *productkeyword**noun*.com
Niche: medical/health
Nature: product site

On-site SEO Stats:

26 times primary KW is used out of 664 words = almost 5%

META TITLE has the primary keyword at the start then a good generic phrase.

Outbound link is only to the product itself with an affiliate ID tied.

Very simple, no other pages, well-siloed.

Off-Site SEO Stats: Link Velocity (last 90 days), backlink distribution (fix your eyes on the very high DOFOLLOW ratio and the 17 redirects), CTLD distribution (anybody said, Russian?), anchor text diversity (confirmed: too much of it)

Redirects: Low quality, nothing stands out.

Dofollows: A lot of high PR links from foreign sites. I suspect them to be SAPE or other group private blog network since the language varies.

Conclusion: Very close to getting a penalty. I believe what keeps him from getting one is that the on-site is well structured and not spammed out. The high PR links linking to him are freshly made though (past 90 days) which probably explains why they haven't been deindexed or found out yet.

Anyone noticed how crappy that site actually is with only few 100 words of content and near 80 pages indexed that either shouldn't be indexed or that give a 404 error?

Maybe no one noticed that he delivered traffic stats till 19/05 (1 day before Panda4.0 launched)?

Right now he's definitely not ranking as well as before, ranking at #6 for the main keyword with very similar sites above you does terrible things for conversions, in other words he will hardly sell a thing at this point.

Don't even understand how people can be so retarded to bid on such site and that it eventually sells for $12k (123 bids).

And look at the timing, auction started on 20/05, and on 10/05 and 15/05 there were already some updates that gave a sneak preview on Panda4.0 so I bet he alraedy knew which road that went, well planned scam attempt to pull as much money as he could. No wonder he started bidding at $1,-, site must have made close to nothing at that point.

Ranking at #6 hardly brings in any money when sites above you are similar in setup, friend of mine ranks at #4 for a certain high volume keyword with 3 other affiliate sites above him. Sites also makes close to nothing due to that, and he receives only a tiny 60-70 unique visitors per day. In certain niches you really need to be #1-#2 to exponentially increase income. At #4 you could make $100/month vs $3000/month at #1. Yes that's 30 times more opposed to 8 times more visits (theoretically)

#1 40% traffic
#2 20% traffic
#3 10% traffic
#4 5% traffic

But those number obvious get crushed big time when the top 4 sites look so similar (crappy EMD's), that's quite a bit different then for example

#1 Amazon
#2 Wikipedia
#3 Your site

Where you can expect a fair share of traffic with a review site as Amazon / Wikipedia will be largely ignored if they're looking for an independant review (no idea why actually cause Amazon has REAL reviews instead of fabricated crap that we publish).