Question about curious ranking

[theshortstack]

Ok, I'm a little confused about this.

I've put up a site in a relatively small niche where there's not much competition. The number 1 ranking site only has one page up there and the third place listing in Google is an article from ezine.

I've managed to pick up the exact match domain name and put about 20 or 30 pages of unique content up there with a few decent back links.

So I don't quite get why Google has indexed the site and ranked it at number 185 (according to Rankchecker).

I suppose I should mention that the content was originally on a different domain, but I've 301'd all the pages correctly to point to this new domain so I don't think that should be an issue.

Is it possible to see whether some sort of penalty has been attached to the domain before I bought it? Or am I just being impatient?!

[meaganandersen]

Ok, I'm a little confused about this.

I've put up a site in a relatively small niche where there's not much competition. The number 1 ranking site only has one page up there and the third place listing in Google is an article from ezine.

I've managed to pick up the exact match domain name and put about 20 or 30 pages of unique content up there with a few decent back links.

So I don't quite get why Google has indexed the site and ranked it at number 185 (according to Rankchecker).

I suppose I should mention that the content was originally on a different domain, but I've 301'd all the pages correctly to point to this new domain so I don't think that should be an issue.

Is it possible to see whether some sort of penalty has been attached to the domain before I bought it? Or am I just being impatient?!

Well it takes time to make all the changes to be noticed by Google. If you did the right optimization on your website's pages then you might just rank in the future. Can I know what keyword is it? If you are targetting a small niche you may rank in short tail keywords.. but if it is a huge niche you have to choose appropriate keywords to focus to make it in SERPs.