Googles fixation on old sites gets me...

Why do they fixate on old sites that are never updated?


Best example is the website in number 1 position for "dog training"

Last time it was updated was in 2001!!

Alot of its links are out of date, etc, etc.

Besides all it is a huge collection of links where half of them lead to no where.

Why does it have top spots in index?

Other sites in there are either spam or old un updated sites as well mostly hold static content.

Why??

 

It is probably considered a "trusted" site by Google and has lots of links from other "trusted" sites. It may not be fair but it is certaintly not a spam site for sure .

 

Well yes, I realise that. It being an EDU site makes it even more evident.


Just shows how imperfect their algo is. That site is dead.


Even though its trusted, its dead.

 

From what I have noticed google seems to overlook a lot of practices by old sites. I know of a few older domains that rank # 1 for their primary phrases that use doorway pages, link farms, duplicate content and have several mirror sites. These sites have not moved at all from their rankings. I have stated this before I believe google gives more weight to the age of a site than the backlinks.

To offer proof look at this site which is not in my market and compare it to the other sites below it. www.sandiegohomes.com/ this site has very few backlinks but is the oldest site for that market.

 

Age of sites is just one of hundreds of factors they use to determine relevency. I think we would all agree that age should not be the only factor, but it should definitely be a factor. There is no perfect algorithm for figuring this stuff out, and that is why you see exceptions like this on occasion. But overall they do a pretty decent job of showing good, relevent sites. It is a 80-20 approach. If they can hit the mark 80% of the time, they are extremely successful. And age is one of the many factors that helps them hit that 80 mark I would guess.

 

Nice post and I agree that Google does the best NOT perfect job of finding the relevant sites for most search terms. And age is not the only detemining factor. There are plenty of sites that rank ahead of older sites.

 

Google is always giving preference to .edu sites and the truth is that many of them are outdated.

 

It's a way to filter out spam. But it's only a temporary band-aid. Eventually spammy sites will be old and have aged links.

 

But will they have links from trusted sites. This is a great summary of trust rank and how it can work. And most spammers (not all) are looking for the quick kill and move on to get the highest ROI.

 

Your thread reminded me something.

A couple of week ago, I wanted to get the most updated information about meta tags.
Sounds reasonable - right ?

Went to Google, typed Meta Tags... And got this article: How To Use HTML Meta Tags

http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931

Now, go there and take a look at the date of the article.

What do you think ?

 

Yeah, just further prooves that google thinks waaaay to highly of dates.

 

In fairness to Google, I found that result #1 in the same "meta tag" search at Yahoo and MSN. But your point is valid... Google needs to incorporate whether the content matter needs to be fresh before weighting the importance of a site.

 

Websites are like houses and wine. The tend to age well, especially if you update them. Thats why if you try to buy a PR 5 site that is 3 years old, be prepared to spend in excess of 10 to 15 grand.

 

Good point. I was mostly speaking to the link and site aging factor. I still think that a lot of SERPs that are "outdated" just show up because of the age of their links, and of their sites. Eventually Google will have to change their algo, to both eliminate old outdated sites and reflect the fact that all sites (including spammy ones) have links that have been in place for years.

 

the page in question is an edu pr6
dog section has about 105 pages
the main "full" site has about 354,000 pages indexed

if i had a sub section with 100+ pages on the same topic with enough links to get to pr6 i would be well miffed if it did not do well for that topic

the only way i can see that G can filter out some of the old stuff as not relvant is to devalue a page for each out of date (dead) outbound link it contains

 

It probably gets its PR from being lited on main EDU domain. which is probably around pr8-9

As well as bunch of other dirs, etc.

 

i saw a site before in google getting top #1 and #2 for ranking "need money", this sites are probably old...google is really crazy..hard to determine their algo though..

 

Tell me about it.......

My site is page 1 on yahoo, page 4 on msn and nowhere on google.

 

I like your dog training site

I agree that the age matters....

2 of my oldest domains do the best job in google,,, and rest do better on yahoo and msn.

 

Thanks!