Just to jump into the domain age argument for a second. My bands website has been up for about 10 years and I haven't touched it for 5. The optimisation is very spammy by todays standards, and the code is horrendous (remember this was done 5/6 years ago). There's only a few pages, hardly any content and very few in bound links.
Despite all that, it ranks 2nd in the uk for a search on they keyword "surround" (
surround - Google Search), which has over 67 million results. I can only assume this is simply due to the length of time it has been there and the trust it has built.