Google SERPs "Signal to Noise Ratio"

Will PPC advertising kill the king?

[lexipixel]

I know this subject has been beaten up and down, but it seems to get worse.

While doing SEO on a new customer's site, I did a fairly comprehensive check of everything I could find in the SE's related to the site, (I focused on Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL, but did check a few aggregators like DogPile and Mamma to backup what I found).

While performing one search for content I knew was old and outdated but related to this customer's presense on the SE's, (pages from a subdomain of a cart software company that he used prior to setting up his own store), I tallied up how many "bad links" were in the SERPs for this, (e.g. subdomain.cart-company.tld).

Here's the score:

=============================
Engine: (pages / URLs found)
=============================
Google: (450)
Yahoo: (65)
AOL: (8)
MSN: (0)
=============================

Yes, while MSN serch had cleared all the old dead wood from it's index, and AOL had very little left.. the "big two" had lots of bad results -- and Google took home the prize.

These links are for pages that were gone over (6) months ago, and 90% of them result in a 404 or an old improperly coded 302 ( a .php custom error handler on the previous host's server)... but no content per-se.

I have to ask myself (again and again), does Google like bad links? Is PPC revenue so important that they keep the SERPs full of junk so searchers will eventually click a paid ad? Everything seems to point in that direction --- unless I want to beleive that Google is incapable of cleaning up their index.

My next thought goes to the fact that I have sites monetized with Adsense -- so I feel partially responsible --- Knowing that if I bite the hand that feeds me, I will get kicked in the butt by the foot attached to the same beast.

I have to think G's conflicting interest of "delivering dividends to shareholders" is diametrically opposed to "providing good clean natural search results"... Worse, to keep the brand name in good standing with the general searching public, they can't deliver complete garbage results.. and the problem goes full circle again.