indeed. there is no industry that is SPAM only but it can be 98% or 99% SPAM. The rest are “OK” sites that got “KO” by the SPAM. They can’t compete simply because the trend is given by the 99%.

If you look on the buy viagra search you will see the majority of the grey sites are in the situation you desribe and that is because they were once hackend and they got a lot of links pointing at them with commercial anchor text for the keywords targeted ( like a Google Bomb).

Unfortunately as you say they tend to get higher, again another delay in the Google algo until it figures what it is about.

my 2c 🙂

I do however think it’s a myth that some industries are only spammy. For example the Payday loan industry does have many sites who play by the rules and deserve to rank but simply don’t.

One thing I spotted when I checked the results was some hacked sites were showing for “payday loans”. Their only mention of the terms was the word hidden once in the source code but Google ranked them because the sites themselves were strong. Further proof they are prioritising the site strength over relevance to the term. Sadly that’s going to be easy to game if unrelated hacked sites can rank.

It’ll be interesting to see this change.