Difference Between Google Preaching vs. Reality - Crap still rules?

[ExploreConsulting]

This post is deleted!

[BlueprintMarketing]

You're really asking somebody to do a kind of work analyzing the sites and then at the end giving their data along with their opinion.
Secondly you you're not taking site structure into account and about 200 other metrics that have not been mentioned.
Frankly there's too much that goes into Google's algorithm to give you an answer that is going to be right on the dot. The choice has been made by the algorithm and it will stay that way until it changes.
I'm not trying to give you a short answer however this is the truthful one and chasing after websites that maybe deserved their rank or maybe not is not the best way to spend time in my opinion.
Chances are if it's very low-quality and not a lot of inbound links of relevancy or authority that Google has not finished what is currently doing grading every show website on the web even for Google that is a lot of work.

I wish I could be of more help to you,

check out distilled.net/U

it is a fantastic technical SEO learning tool very advanced.

however it's probably page rank/domain rank domain trust and relevant links that allows the one that's winning to stay on top

it could be that there is a better site however that site has over 150 links per page and too much JavaScript at the top thus Google bot cannot the read/index the site making it almost invisible.

Thomas

[Zoolander]

When links where treated less strictly by Google, a decent site with good content, a readership and happy customers, I guess would have had to fight fire with fire in terms of backlinks compared to competitors for the same exposure (I say competitors for the same exposure rather than "competitors" because at one time in the past even "relevance" wasn't as much a factor).

A decent site getting future proof links that were harder to get (and therefore less of them) would perhaps have not appeared on google.  Given the previous lack of discrimination in links, a decent site would have had to work hard to make google's search results decent, and for the same reason when google update's it's algorithms years later, gets the boot.  If that's not Ironic I don't know what is.

I'm looking for places to guest post and keep seeing good relevant sites which have had their rank and traffic go downhill.  It's giving me a head ache.