Hi My Friends, Do you know what is the most important thing that has caused most of the webmasters and bloggers give up, specially in the last two years? Let me give you a clue. In the last two years, search engines and specially Google have become so improved and don't rank most of the websites that they were used to be ranked before. These websites have a big common problem. Some of the webmasters have been able to solve this problem but most of them can not do that and so give up. What is that common problem?
I am not really sure what U R asking.. for each site that moves down in the rankings.. another moves up..... so obviously not EVERYONE is failing.
Nah, Google likes new content. If you keep writing new and original content and get a few sites to link to you, then you will be ok.
Peope who work with pageranks in mind are wasting half of the time that they could invest improving content to make search engines do the job by themselves.
Google gives importance to both back links and relevance of content. The importance of these two implies that Google wants to rank higher sites that have been updated and are well taken cared of. The sites and blogs that have been stopped probably couldn't continue with constant updating and linking.