dickbaker - 1:12 pm on May 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

Is it even possible to create a theory when the results are so screwed up? I'm monitoring many phrases in distinctly different niches and, in almost every one, there's at least one site that is MFA, a scraper site, or just simply doesn't belong on the first page or any page of Google. It would be like doing a study on sea life of the Louisiana coast and trying to work around the effects of the oil spill.

These sites have keywords in the URL's, in the page titles, or in the copy. And then there's sites that have none of the above. There's sites that have thousands of pages or visitors and then sites with a couple of pages or visitors. These sites have displaced really good, on-topic sites.

There are now sites in these various niches that have been on page one, or are even #1, that are either total junk or irrelevant to the search term, but have been in these coveted positions for a week or more.