Age Factor in Google Hurting the SERPs

The importance of each one of different factors influencing the SERPs in Google seems to vary across different markets nowadays – e.g. I constantly see SERPs where PR6 pages go way lower than PR0 or PR 2 pages (old news of course, PR not being a major factor any more, at least in the form available to the general public), or I have seen SERPs where 100 links beat 10,000 links, and I have even seen SERPs (gasp! what would Jim Boykin say? 😉 ) where 2-year-old sites were beating 10-year-old sites to the top spots.

But here’s one example of SERPs where age factor is definitely overplaying to the point where it hurts the quality of these SERPs, as described in this post by Affiliate Money Maker:

I headed to Google and ran a quick search. Google returned almost 9 million results for “send a fax by email” – wow that’s impressive. What have we got here?

The first one was TPC Fax (tpc.int) – a site last updated in 2001. You see, in the old days of non-monetized Internet there was a community initiative to support sending faxes by email through privately operated printer servers. This was a free community service supported exclusively by good will of people participating in this project. Well that was a long time ago. I don’t know how reliable or widespread it was, but currently it is not working any more.

Digging through a bunch of FAQ’s and equally old sites that are of no use any longer,<...>

It is pretty clear that the search was meant to be for sites actually providing these services – and what comes up instead? A bunch of aged but practically useless results… Not a good job, Google.

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