Google has made it incredibly hard for content to rank on its own if your site isn't seen as "authoritative" (read: has tons of backlinks and is at least 6+ months old). For most competitive terms, you won't rank at all unless you have a Domain Authority (DA) in excess of 30+

It makes content creators miserable. Some of us just want to write good stuff and get traffic through Google, not build backlinks and be a SEO

My pet theory is that Google got a bit desperate in the battle against web spam, and decided to use a somewhat crude hammer. Perhaps overweighting the various factors that control ranking to favor either content hosted on "big names", or not distant from "big names" in the link graph.

My pet theory is (in no particular order):

* lack of https * lack of http/2.0 * lack of CDN utilization (aka lack of speed) * lack of Google backed advertising * lack of continuous updates * lack of inbound links * content not minimized * content not zipped

All contribute to a decreasing Google Page Rank (TM) over time.

Most of those are orthogonal to the quality and relevance of the content.

slow sites and stale ones are -ve signals of quality

Slow can certainly be a negative signal, I agree (though if the content is mostly just HTML and CSS without much media then speed only means so much).

But depending on the topic, "stale" may not mean much about quality at all. I've had a FAQ site about Tolkien's books online for at least 15 years now, and as it turns out he hasn't been publishing much lately (being dead and all). So apart from minor updates every few years when his son or other researchers publish new information from his drafts and notes, the site has been largely static for a decade or more. It's very good at its intended purpose, and it's hard to imagine what I could do to provide a steady stream of new content to indicate "freshness" without fundamentally changing the nature of the site.

I imagine that the same is true of a lot of sites out there, on a lot of topics that are far removed from the "breaking news" world.

Of course, you can have all those things and still be slow. Medium.com pages, for example, are pretty bloated for a blog. But perhaps Google is fine with an inaccurate proxy for "fast."

Yes, it used to be content truly was king. That mantra is long dead now, though.

In fact it can be argued that content was never king:

http://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742 (from 2001)

Do you think they are favoring pages that have adsense on them?

I'm almost sure they're not. In all my years working for the ads section of Google I've never once heard the tiniest hint of anything like that, but I have repeatedly slammed my head into the firewall separating Search from everything else.

Google seems quite determined not to risk being seen as biased in that way.

Good to know.

> and has no ads.