Originally Posted by Tempest

Well my point was that you were making it seem like you can't get a high ranking unless you update all the time and that's simply not true otherwise all those static pages that rank high wouldn't be there. There are pages that haven't changed for years and rank #1 for some terms simply because they have the right text on them and they have a shitload of inbound links, with a ton of them using the proper anchor text.

Take the search term MILFs on google.. The guy who has that milf.com site is apparently an SEO guy and has a shit load of those types of pages out there... his site is a 4 and it rarely changes. Having said that, it has changed a little since the last time I looked at it. A couple half hidden links have been added etc. But, it ranks higher than the hoes page which is a PR 6 and updates every couple days. Why? The page is about MILFs. It links to predominately milf sites. The majority of inbound links will probably use milfs in the anchor text. Probably a lot of the inbound links are also from milf related sites.. and it has the term in the domain. Thus, it ranks higher than a PR 6 site. Note that the current recip links on hoes for that page use the term MILF and not MILFs. hoes does rank higher than the milf.com site for the term MILF.

Yes, updating every day can have a positive effect on your ranking, but it's only 1 of about 6-7 things that affect your rank. I have yet to see a lower PR site that updates every day dominate the serps simply because it updates every day.. but I have seen pages that dominate almost strictly because of their PR even if the page isn't about the search phrase but happens to contain the words from the phrase. In order to get that PR, you need inbound links. Who cares if those inbound links are from blogs that never change. It's an inbound link that is positive for your PR.

As opposed to deleting those trades, a smarter thing would be to "penalize" them by moving them way down on the page so that they don't get as much traffic (since they probably won't be sending as much due to not updating). Keep the active blogs up top. That way you continue to get the benifit of the inbound link. Of course replacing them with better PR and incoming traffic sites is always the best option.