Believe it has a lot to do with the rank of people you play against. If you queue with some friends who are higher rank and do OK you'll probably rank up quickly.
I haven't played GO much but last time I played I had the nerd star rank even though I only had maybe 15ish wins and went around 1:1 in most matches I played. Pretty sure it's because I queued with a lot of people who were master guardian or higher so we had higher rank opponents.