So What's Up With Those Crappy Search Results?

[sbrault74]

I used to rank for some keywords now I've been outranked by crappy websites.

But what amazes me most is that among the top 10 results for a particular keyphrase, 3 of these results point to websites that are no longer online! Worst than that, these websites have to backlinks!

So how come 404 pages / non-existing websites rank higher than I do?

Is Google loosing it or are they trying to create so much confusion in the hope that website owners will turn to Adwords?

[crushthenet]

I've been noticing this too. Seems like a lot of the results are old too. When I'm searching for things where I need "fresher" results I always have to add "2013" to the search to get posts and articles that are actually current. When searching frequently for web development and WordPress related information, it's important that it's not from several years ago because it's no longer relevant. The code has changed, the plugins have changed, etc. I'm not interested in some article or blog post from 2006 that covers WordPress 2.7.

And just a general decline in good results is very noticeable to me. I'm sure they do their best to make that algorithm as good as possible, but it seems to me like they're missing something. Personally I think they should give more weight to the owner of the site by checking WHOIS and have almost like a quality score for domain owners. If you have a good track record for building quality sites you would get more weight that way.

The new up and coming sites really have to work to get up there in rank, we all know that, but it's not a good thing. Somebody could release an amazing site tomorrow and we won't see it in the search results for how long? A year, two years? Obviously depends on a lot of factors. I think there's beginning to be a giant opportunity for someone to build a rival to Google and Bing etc. by thinking outside the box on the whole concept of "search" in general.