Will Google start trimming 'stale' sites rank?

[oznappies]

With the recent focus on Google to reduce rank of farms and low value sites, I am interested to get SEO view on if you think Google will start devaluing stale sites. I do find it a bit frustrating that in the top 5 for my main key phrase, there is one site that has NO content just an error and another blog that has not updated content in 2 years.

How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5?

How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd.

I am interested so see others experiences and thoughts on 'user experience' clean ups by Google and why these types of sites get missed?

[oznappies]

We have been producing lots of content, being active in forums and getting good links for strong sites in our marketting area and the site has shot from 100+ to 50, 30, 25, 12, 12, 12. There we are stuck at the moment, so I guess we have to do the next round of improvements and get better content out there. Thanks for the advice Egol & Alan

[EGOL]

How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5?

How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd.

You can work really hard to get above them or you can wait for Google to devalue these pages.

Those are your choices.

But if google devalues those pages and drops them you will still be in position #9.  I say that you still have a lot of work to do.  .

Now.... Let's say that you rank #3 with the error page and stale page above you.  I  bet that you will be in good position because people who check #1 and #2 will be delighted when they find you at #3.

Start working to get #3.

I see stale blogs and error pages above me once in a while.  I ask myself... "Does that stale blog have kickass content?"... if it does I respect it... and... "Does that site with the 404's have a lot of kickass links?" .... if it does then I worry that they will discover the problem and fix it - and I will have a real competitor.

Consider this approach.... Look at all of those sites above you and decide to create content for this KW that puts all of them to shame.  Blow them out of the water with a great article, an interactive, a video, a cartoon, statistical analysis or better yet a big page with several of these.  Toss that up, forget about it, don't even linkbuild, come back in a year to check.  I bet you will be surprised with the results.  (If you want faster results tell a couple of influential  bloggers in your niche who regularly point to new content about what you have created - but that could pull in competitors.)

[AlanBleiweiss]

there could be many reasons - if you're in position 12, that's not just 1 site ahead of you - that's 11.  That tells me you have many other things to work on since it's so many sites ahead of you for that

[oznappies]

I really hope it is part of their plan as the do keep pushing 'improve the user experience'. How do you compete against a 10 year old site, moz DR 57? Even when it has been idle for two year it still holds position 3.

The keyphrase we are tragetting heavely still only gets us to #12 and there 1 stale and 1 dead on page 1 - doh!

I have even tried to buy the dead domain, but even the email for the owner is dead.

[AlanBleiweiss]

slowly but surely, one step at a time, they work to deal with all the garbage.  As much as I too hate that kind of site showing up in the results, it's likely that there's much less of that out there than these other things they've been targeting. However I don't know and haven't done any kind of study on that.

In other words, I really hope they already plan on getting to it and just haven't yet.  Otherwise I'm going to scream.  Again.